The World is Flat
Acadia Partners’ business is conservation. Sure, we have a special niche to fill in the world of conservation, supporting the scientific research that the Park needs and promoting related science education, But, in the grand scheme of things, we’re conservationists.
Here’s the rub: People don’t conserve when they are living on the economic edge — instead, they use whatever is at hand, ignoring the ecological costs. In an earlier article I have written about the need for a conservation ethic — a sense of obligation to the land in place of the conviction that nature is there for us to use. But we also know that such a reciprocal relationship between people and land — that sense of obligation and connection to place — can emerge only when people are meeting their own needs.
Put simply, conservation emerges out of economic stability.
That’s why Thomas Friedman’s most recent best selling book, The World is Flat, is required reading for conservationists. It is also required reading for anyone concerned about the future of scientific research. I’ll go one step farther. It is required reading for anyone thinking hard about the future of the United States.
Friedman’s Argument in a Nutshell
Hats off to Friedman for taking on a really big problem. The great value of The World is Flat is that it pulls together a great deal of the world around us — technology, terrorism, international relations, domestic politics, economics, and more — and takes a shot at showing how all of these trends are connected and, more important, and where we seem to be headed.
The odds are very much against Friedman’s having the details all right in such an ambitious effort. The value is in the general shape of the picture that emerges as Friedman draws lines between all those dots. Here is the overview:
- Over the last 15 to 20 years, a we have seen the emergence of a potent combination of new technologies and investments. (For example, the Internet, an excess of digital bandwidth connecting disparate parts of the globe, open source software, and workflow that makes it possible to connect different business processes.)
- Over the last decade companies and individuals have developed the new habits of thought, internal processes, and business models that allow them to make powerful use of these new capabilities. (For example, outsourcing, offshoring, and new kinds of collaborative work.)
- In the last five years 3 billion additional people suddenly came on to this newly level and highly connected playing field — many of them equipped to play the game of world commerce at a world-class level. Many more are quickly learning to play the game.
Friedman argues that the United States has been slow to respond to this leveling of the playing field and to this enormous increase in competition. Part of the reason for this slow response is simply that we are used to being the leading source of innovation — in other words, we’ve become complacent. But our slow response is also due our focusing our attention elsewhere since 9/11. Friedman puts it this way::
"The two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of protectionism — excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal security — and excessive fears of competing in a world [that has opened up since the fall of the Berlin Wall] that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in search of economic security. Both would be a disaster for us and for the world." [p. 469, first edition ]
Instead of putting up walls, Friedman would have us imagine new new era of possibility and discovery, similar to our nation’s push in the 1960s to create the educational system and research infrastructure that put a man on the Moon. In President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 speech calling for the national commitment required to create such a program, he said,
"Let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs … This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, materiel and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts."
Friedman sees a similar opportunity today to call America out of a state of complacency and fear:
"If President Bush is looking for a similar legacy project, there is one just crying out — a national science initiative that would be our generation’s moon shot: a crash program for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in ten years. If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia onto the path of reform — which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil — strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. He would also create a real magnet to inspire young people to contribute to both the war on terrorism and America’s future by again becoming scientists, engineers, and mathematicians." [ p. 284, first edition ]
In short, Friedman would like to move away from what he sees as the current culture of fear. He would like to see the U.S. replace fear with hope, commitment to competition, and a belief that out nation’s future is best served by creating a worldwide sense of possibility.
Some Problems With All This
There is a lot to learn from the argument that Friedman develops in The World is Flat. So many books that reach for big problems manage only to provide a lot of stimulating anecdotes, without the careful analysis and argument that is necessary to tie the whole complicated set of problems together, and to suggest a solution. Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods comes to mind as an example: Louv wrote an important book that points to a real problem, but also one that fails to come to grips with the problem. (I took a close look at Last Child in the Woods in some earlier articles.) Friedman does better than that — he actually provides a way to understand what is happening. That makes the book worth reading.
But I also have some real discomfort with Friedman’s approach to the problem — particularly with regard to his apparent confidence that market forces, in a flat world, will produce generally good outcomes.
Markets only deal with values that are monetized. Worse, monetizing values creates an illusion that they can somehow be traded off against each other. If we monetize the value of, say, a species of flies, and if we then find that the value returned by a development project that would extinguish the species exceeds the value of the species, the logical response in market terms would be to build the project and extinguish the species.
There are a number of obvious technical problems with this mechanism and its conclusion. How, for example, do we ensure that the market has a reasonably accurate estimate of the future returns in value from the species? But those are just details. From the standpoint of conservation ethics, there is an even more fundamental problem: From whose viewpoint do we measure value? The viewpoint of the human developers? Or that of the flies?
This isn’t just a silly or a cute question. If you are looking at the overall health of a system, when would you ever choose to equate the benefit to the whole system with the benefit of a single class of actors in the system? Particularly when the class of actors in question is a leading source of stress on the system?
You wouldn’t.
So, why would you expect markets, which measure value only in human terms, to provide good results from the perspective of the ecosystem?
You shouldn’t. But we do. And Friedman seems untroubled by it. (See "Belonging Here" for a different look at the shortcomings of economic utility, in place of a land ethic.)
I am also troubled by the potential displacement, in Friedman’s flat world, of local knowledge and know-how with "flatter," global approximations of that knowledge. I think of the state of fishing off of our own coast. It seems to me that the "flat world" view results in fishing a species until it is wiped out. We are only now feeling our way with this, but it does seem that local engagement, local knowledge, and local commitment are required in order to encourage stewardship of a resource, rather than its extraction.
Maine in a Flat World
However, even given my reservations about Friednman’s enthusiasm for market forces and flatness, it is worth paying close attention to the argument he develops. Especially here in Maine.
One of the things that struck me hard as I read this book was that the technological changes and the new ways of doing business — the changes that enable Bangalore to out-compete Bangor for software development or call center operations — are still only at an early stage here in Maine. I have written about this before, describing it as a kind of "digital divide." Rather than benefiting from new technologies, Maine ends up further behind. This happens despite the fact that, in theory, place and physical proximity should be less important in a flat world. Heck … it the flat world helps Bangalore, why not Bangor? Or Gouldsboro, Steuben, or Eastport?
There are a couple of answers to this. One is that in a flat world, plain "vanilla" skills and systems won’t do. For example, Friedman explains that Mexicans began noticing that "some statuettes of Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, were being imported into Mexico from China, probably via ports in California. When you are Mexico and your claim to fame is that you are a low-wage manufacturing country, and some of your people are importing statuettes of your own patron saint from China, because China can make them and ship them all the way across the Pacific more cheaply than you can produce them, you are are living in a flat world." [page 309]
In other words, the good news is that all of this new technology makes it easier for workers in Bangor — or Winter Harbor — to connect with New York in San Francisco. The bad news is that workers from Bangalore and Beijing are just as connected. To play in this arena, Maine needs to upgrade its skills — corporate and individual — to compete at a world-class level. "Pretty good" is not good enough anymore, even when it is local. In a flat world, locality matters much less, and competence, efficiency, and quality matter more. The level of play ratchets upward.
But it is worse than that. People and companies in Maine are often less well connected with New York and San Francisco than they would be if they were in Bangalore or Beijing. Even worse, the people here in Maine are less familiar with the tools and techniques of a flat world, and are falling farther behind, fast. In general, we don’t know how to make effective, productive use of digital collaboration, instant communication, automated workflows, or even simple publication tools such as blogs and podcasts. That means that our skills are increasingly out of synch with the realities of the flat world. We are less able to play the game, even if we do finally get the connectivity.
The Way Forward
Hey. I’m a realist and a pragmatist. No matter how uncomfortable I am with our focus on markets, rather than ethics, obligation, and stewardship, I also know that we live in a world where conservation must make headway in a market economy.
Let’s take Friedman’s thesis seriously. So, what do we do?
Well, first of all, let’s make sure that the world is just as flat here in Maine as it is elsewhere. If Friedman is right, having a state that still requires knowledge workers to rely on dial-up connections over much of the state is going to do a lot of damage in a short time. Making the investment to ensure that broadband access to the Internet is available everywhere in Maine is a good investment. At least we can get out on the playing field.
Second, we need to invest in providing today’s children with more education in mathematics and the sciences. Although Maine and the rest of the U.S. are already feeling the effects of global competition in a flat world today, the real competition heats up over the next 20 years, and countries like China move from being leading manufacturers to leading designers and innovators. It is the quality of the training that we are providing to children today that will determine the degree of economic health — and ability to commit to conservation — that Maine enjoys over the next 20 years.
Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center can play an important, useful role in providing the natural science component of this education. We are already doing that for children in grades 5 through 8 with the Schoodic Education Adventure program. We need to expand that to include high school students.
Third, we need to give teachers the training and tools they need to ensure that science and mathematics education is not only first-rate, but also engaging. Once again, Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center are already playing a role here, and can do much more.
These first three points — provide the connectivity, train the students, train the teachers — are steps toward a more secure economic environment for all of Maine and the U.S. There is also work that is more directly tied to conservation.
I have written before about the fact that Acadia is really a very small protected area. Its health depends on the larger, and largely unprotected ecosystem that extends beyond the Park boundaries, along the Downeast coast and inland all the way up to the County. The technologies and new ways of interacting that Friedman describes in The World is Flat create new opportunities to cooperate across agencies and across institutions to work on larger-scale conservation problems. In a flat world, it should be much easier to look at conservation from the standpoint of whole ecological regions–in our case, embracing much of New England and the Maritime Provinces in Canada. Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center are not staffed in a way that would allow us to become the center of such conservation efforts, but we can be active participants and contributors. More important, perhaps, we can take a leadership role in encouraging the development of such landscape-scale conservation work.
Our Best Days Are Ahead of Us
Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat sounds an alarm. The world is changing rapidly — the rules of play are being rewritten — and we are not paying attention and are not making the investment required to enable us to compete effectively in the world that is emerging. This is especially true in Maine — we face a real risk of finding that our economic lot is even harder and less rewarding. Such an outcome would be bad for those of us who live here, and would be bad for conservation at Acadia and in the ecosystem that surrounds it.
But Friedman’s book is also optimistic. Friedman argues that this country’s greatest days are still ahead of it, rather than in some golden age in the past. All we need to do is decide that we really do want to fully engage in this new competition, rather than trying to wall it off.
Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center have roles to play in ensuring that the best days for the people of this area, and for the land, plants, and animals that we are committed to conserving, are still in the future.
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