THE RENEWABLE WAY OF LIFE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690012-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 13, 2009
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: April 1, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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The rising cost and uncertain supply of
petroleum and natural gas are focusing
new attention on green plants as a
source of energy. But firewood, grain
alcohol, and methane are only a small
part of the enormous "bioresource" that
surrounds the world. In the following
THE article, two leading thinkers offer some
insights into this invaluable resource.
rIENBVABLE
Bioresource is a new word in our vocabulary, and for
od reason. The subject is as old as hunting, fishing,
d farming. But the 1970s have seen a wholesale shift
pective that makes renewable processes suddenly
pers
\YIAV
by Harlan Cleveland
and Alexander King
seem fresh, attractive, and much more important in our
immediate future than in our recent past.
The biological resources have been out there all the
time, often ignored or exploited or wasted yet somehow
durable in their seasonal reincarnations. There is the
three-fifths of the biomass that is green plants, from the
slenderest ferns to the sturdiest Sequoias; the one-fifth
that is animals (including Man, the only animal that
theorizes about biology or resources); and the one-fifth
that is microorganisms or "microbes." But to think
about all of this, in an integrated way, as a resource-
that is new.
vi .
xor the generation of wind and water power. The
urces: agricultural products, firewood, simple de-
Renewable Resources
Until quite recently, all humanity existed (and part of
humanity flourished) mainly on the basis of renewable
centuries and more ago, the life-support systems began
'But w ; he impetus of the Industrial Revolution two
aj . of the human population still does so today.
ransform the very nature of society in many parts of
World.
e new industrial societies developed by the ac-
flation of scientific knowledge and the spread of
1, not as in the past essentially by the annual bounty
hhological innovation. The industrial societies were
ature, but also by the consumption of vast amounts
enewable resources-especially minerals (which
ed all the chemical elements) and fossil fuels, at
coal and then oil, which had stored up the solar en-
trapped by photosynthesis over the aeons.
use of these new (and eventually exhaustible)
the way bioresources were used. The traditional vege-
table and animal fibers, for example, were increasingly
replaced or extended by synthetics manufactured from
coal and petrochemicals, altering the patterns of con-
sumption, land use, international trade, and the distri-
sources of energy influenced human development not
only through industrial processes; they also modified
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bution of wealth. Exotic foods from around the world
were transported to metropolitan centers in ships,
trains, and trucks powered by fossil fuels. Even in agri-
culture, profound changes have resulted from the use of
oil-driven tractors and other farm machinery, synthetic
fertilizers, and a wide range of agricultural chemicals
derived, once again, from fossil fuels; these now contri-
bute a considerable proportion of the total energy input
to food production in the most productive parts of the
world. And in parallel with these developments (and
made possible in part by them), expansion of world
population has been extremely rapid, calling for ever
greater quantities of foods and goods of all kinds, entail-
ing the use of still further quantities of nonrenewable re-
sources and energy.
But this pell-mell human intervention in the use of
natural resources was often the opposite of beneficial.
Through ignorance, thoughtlessness, and the lack of a
sense of responsibility for the future, early practices-
clearing land by "slash and burn," overgrazing, and
damaging agricultural techniques of many kinds-led to
desertification and environmental deterioration in many
places. Today, with the great increase in the quantum of
human activity, danger to the natural environment is
more serious than ever.
During the decade of the 1970s, three new perceptions
became pervasive enough to make the decade a kind of
watershed-a moment of major historical change that
spotlighted the bioresource potential. One new percep-
tion was the risk to the natural environment of staying
in the groove of more-is-better economic growth. A sec-
ond perception was the promise of bioresources for
development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And a
third was the sharper focus on the inherent characteris-
tics of the bioresource itself-and their implications for
its purposeful management.
Working with Nature
At the beginning of the 1970s, people in very large
numbers in many parts of the world were questioning
both the possibility and the desirability of continuing to
stimulate "growth" in the directions that had become
traditional-growth of the economic product, human
populations, urban development, numbers of automo-
biles, and size of bureaucracies. The environmental
risks and the threat of resource depletion were only part
-an important part-of this disillusion with material
growth. The doubts about growth were intensified by
the petroleum crisis with its sudden and massive in-
crease in the cost of energy, its wholesale shift in
the world balance of payments and pattern of in-
vestment, and its demonstration of the vulnera-
bility of industrialized, oil-importing countries
to disruption of supplies that could threaten
their economic health and styles of life. Most
of the less developed countries likewise suf-
fered from the greatly increased cost of the fuels and fer-
tilizers they needed if their exploding populations were
to be adequately fed. In both "developed" and "devel-
oping" countries the realization was coming in a rush:
that oil resources could run out, and that new energy
sources had to be found or invented, and developed,
before the oil wells dried up.
The natural conclusion of this line of thinking was to
reassess economic needs and the ways of meeting them
in such a way as to reduce reliance on resources that
might be near exhaustion, or at least would predictably
become more and more costly during the generations to
come. On the positive side, the same reasoning led
naturally to working with nature. Maybe humanity
should modify its economic practices so as to use much
better the bioresources provided, and continuously re-
generated, by a bountiful nature. Maybe the bioproduc-
tivity of the planet could be preserved, and indeed en-
hanced, to ensure this eternal renewal.
The arguments supporting such an approach seemed
clear enough:
? . Present and foreseeable increases in world popula-
tion will call for increases in- materials and energy that
are unlikely to be met if present practices, policies, and
life-styles persist.
THE DIORESOURCE
? Provision of basic physical needs (especially
of food, clothing, shelter) of existing and foresee-
able populations is politically and humanly urgent;
so is a fairer chance for deprived peoples to partici-
pate in a life of modest prosperity and human dignity.
? The limits to the carrying capacity of the planet,
and its toleration of human intervention and waste, are
at best uncertain.
? The interest of future generations-and perhaps
even of our own-requires us to reduce our reliance on
nonrenewable resources such as minerals and fossil
fuels, to adopt conservationist and recycling practices,
and to encourage a much more effective use of the con-
tinuous inflow of solar radiation, notably the photosyn-
thetic mechanism of the green plant.
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? Humanity will need to maintain and increase the
bioproductivity of the planetary soil, and mould agri-
cultural policies and practices so as to ensure a full and
regenerative use of the biomass available to man, recy-
cling "wastes" as a new form of raw material.
Help for Third World
Multinational and bilateral aid programs have tried
hard to reduce the disparities between the world's richer
and poorer regions; much has been achieved, but the
gaps are still wide and in some ways are still widening.
Economic growth in the Third World has, in recent
years, been faster on the average than that of the indus-
"The interest of future
generations-and perhaps even
of our own-requires us to
reduce our reliance on
nonrenewable resources such
as minerals and fossil fuels."
trialized countries. But it started from a very low base-
line; its benefits have been partly absorbed by popula-
tion increase; too much of it has been used for the pur-
chase of military equipment, and some of that repre-
sents a counter-flow of wealth from the poor to the rich;
and much of the development achieved has served
mainly the minority modern sectors of developing coun-
tries, and has not alleviated the misery of those who live
largely outside the money economy.
In considering how the bioresource might be used to
brighten this picture, it may be helpful to recall the
problems, situations, and opportunities that are gen-
erally present in, and are special to, the world's less de-
veloped regions:
? Most of them are in tropical or semitropical zones
and have exceptionally reliable inputs of solar radiation.
? Many of them-though not all-are already over-
populated, are experiencing endemic unemployment
and underemployment, and have abnormally high rates
of current population increase-adding to demands for
food, housing, water, and energy in places where hun-
ger and poverty are already the major problems.
? They generally suffer from a scarcity of conven-
tional energy resources-and in regions where energy
resources may occur in nature, exploration for them has
barely begun.
? Many less developed countries have a high rainfall,
but this is often seasonal and there are many very and
lands.
? Many of the tropical soils are extremely fragile and
particularly vulnerable to unwise agricultural and other
practices.
? Transportation and communication are often diffi-
cult and many villages are virtually isolated.
? Poverty, disease, and malnutrition-interacting on
each other-are widespread.
? In many places, agricultural residues are insuffi-
ciently and inefficiently used. The spoilage of stored
foods by rodents and insects is enormous.
? In tropical lands, however, the temperature, radia-
tion, and water supply favor a much quicker growth of
the biomass than in temperate climates.
The aid programs have not, for the most part,
grasped and modified the pattern of poverty they were
established to tackle. For too long, they took as their
starting point that growth in the gross national product,
as in the industrialized countries, was the unique and in-
evitable path to development everywhere; that the ben-
efits of such growth would rapidly "trickle down" to the
masses of the poor; and that the technologies on which
Northern prosperity is based could be quickly, easily,
and relevantly transferred to quite different social and
cultural environments. The first two assumptions sim-
ply proved to be wrong. The transfer of technology
turned out to be extremely tricky, and its assimilation
and extension fragile and uncertain, in the absence of
scientific and technical competence inside each country,
organically related to the educational system on the one
hand and the productive sectors of agriculture and in-
dustry on the other. The aid programs learned the hard
way that it was not enough for the national scientific
and technological competence to develop just to serve
the interests of particular individuals, groups, or even
nations, if it was not part of a wider infrastructure that
in some sense was serving humanity as a whole.
The promise of the bioresource is its role not as a
Southern "counter culture" but as a complement to
Northern technology. Each country will need, within its
overall social and economic planning, to encourage a
mix of different types of technology, to match its unique
environment, traditions, existing level of development,
and availability of relevant resources. Within this mix,
bioresource development promises much-and has until
now been greatly underestimated. The dangers of linear
technological pathfinding have been illumined by much
analysis, and illustrated by many examples, in the dec-
ade of the 1970s. The bioresource approach opens a
promising array of alternative paths to world develop-
ment.
Science and systems have already clothed the promise
with some visible raiment. First, much empirical experi-
ence has accumulated, mainly in rural and peasant
economies, about new methods of using wastes and
recycling materials so as to increase the bio-yield. Ex-
amples are the widespread use of biogas generated from
CLEVELAND KING
Harlan Cleveland, who has served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO
and president of the University of Hawaii, is currently director of
the Program in International Affairs, Aspen Institute for Huma-
nistic Studies, Princeton, New Jersey 08540. In August 1980, he
will become director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of
Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
Alexander King is chairman of the International Federation of
Institutes of Advanced Study and currently resides at 168 rue de
Grenelle in Paris. With Aurelio Peccei, he was co-founder of the
Club of Rome.
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human and animal waste now common in China and
parts of Southeast Asia; inland pond fish cultivation;
the use of algae as an intermediate in food production;
the speeding up of plant growth (notably in rubber);
and the use of quick-growing leguminous trees that can
provide organic nitrogen, cattle fodder, and wood.
There is also much promise in contemporary biologi-
cal research, for example in enzyme technology, gene-
tics, and a variety of methods for the production of
fixed nitrogen from plants other than the traditional
legumes. Behind the many lines of applied research,
there seem to be great potentials in fundamental work in
molecular biology and cytology. Non-biological devel-
opments in the use of solar energy are also going for-
ward, if somewhat slowly; they can complement the
photosynthetic path in many applications.
A third line of advance comes from the application of
systems science to problems of total or integrated bio-
resource management. The conventional approach has
been to examine the possibilities of particular crops,
wastes, devices, or processes in isolation from each
other, with rather little attention given the management
problems of resource utilization, the economic balance,
or the energy flow. The systems approach tends to focus
on the whole utilization of the biomass available to a
particular community, including the interactions of the
constituent processes, with the central objective of pro-
viding optimum outputs of food, energy, and fertilizers
in an indefinitely sustainable system.
But the most important idea of all inheres not in the
plants or animals or microbes, but in our own minds:
the increasing and encouraging awareness of the inter-
dependence of nations, of problems, of functions, of
scientific disciplines, and of objectives.
The adjectives "holistic" and "integrative" are already
bordering on the cliche, but they have a very special sig-
nificance in the use and management of the bioresource.
They mean, quite literally, that the problems of a
nation, of a city, of a village are to be seen as intercon-
nected and therefore to be tackled simultaneously and
as a complex, not separately or sequentially. The com-
munity's future comprises economic, social, cultural,
and political as well as technical facets; these cannot be
dealt with by the politician alone, or by the economist,
the engineer, or the scientist in isolation. When it comes
to the use of resources, it is necessary to consider them
all: agricultural, forest, soil, water, microorganisms,
plants, animals, men and women. In a particular devel-
opment scheme, only an integrated approach can make
optimum use of the resources; consider food and energy
requirements together; arrange for full use to be made of
"wastes" and "residues"; include traditional agriculture
in the community's planning; maintain soil fertility and
humus content; explore food addition possibilities
through fermentation and the use of plants not
commonly consumed; use plant, animal, and human
wastes to generate biogas for cooking, lighting, refriger-
ation, and distillation; develop algal and fish culture; in-
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vent or adopt simple solar and windpower devices; and
so on almost without end. An integrated plan will in-
clude a careful appreciation of the carrying capacity of
the soil, so that its fertility can be maintained indefini-
tely, as well as of methods for augmenting it, for ex-
ample by inoculation with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. It
will consider the energy balance to ensure that the net
energy balance is positive. And it will look to the preser-
vation of the environment, locally and globally, in rec-
ognition of the place of man in the ecosystem, living in
mandatory symbiosis with all the species of creation.
mICROORGANIC
DIORESOURCES
Character of the Bioresource
What are the inherent characteristics of the biore-
source? How can it be perceived by man, who is part of
it? What direction-signals can we discern in the biore-
Rainbow Fungus source for the development of purposeful technologies,
the construction of an appropriate analytical system to
guide policy choices, and the management of a "mod-
ernization" that makes the best and the most of the only
biosphere we have?
Think first about the essence of the bioresource:
? The bioresource is alive.
? The bioresource is a ubiquitous, continuous store-
house.
? The bioresource is resilient (or adaptive), versatile,
and renewable.
? The bioresource is self-balancing, full of feedback
mechanisms.
? The bioresource is, however, bulky (there is no
way to miniaturize a forest), limited by natural cycles
(each kind of organism will grow only so fast), variable
(each plant or microbe is different, just as people are),
and finite (unlike another recently rediscovered resource
called information).
? The bioresource is interconnected. (No one has said
it better than Lewis Thomas, who writes of the earth as
an "immense organism" where chemical signals "serve
the function of global hormones, keeping balance and
symmetry in the operation of various interrelated work-
ing parts, informing tissues in the vegetation of the Alps
about the state of eels in the Sargasso Sea, by long inter-
minable relays of interconnected messages between all
kinds of other creatures.")
? Above all, the bioresource is essential to human
survival.
Does this inventory of characteristics suggest the
changes in concepts, assumptions, and definitions-that
is, the changes in man's perceptions-that the new em-
phasis on the bioresource. may bring about? We think it
does.
Because it is alive and man is immanent in it, the bio-
resource requires human cooperation with the environ-
ment.
Because it is spread so widely throughout the world,
the bioresource has a potential for promoting equity-
for responding constructively to the "global fairness
revolution." The same cannot be said of oil wells or
uranium deposits. Its ubiquity also carries a potential
for disaggregation and decentralization, and also per-
haps a potential for reordering the urban-rural balance,
which industrial civilization as we have known it has
done so much to distort.
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Microorganism
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Because the bioresource is resilient and self-balancing,
mistakes need not be irreversible. In managing the bio-
mass for human purposes, we might become better able
to learn from trial and error than is safe in, say, the
realm of nuclear physics.
Because it is continuous, the bioresource requires us
to think harder about the interest of future generations,
to include sustainability in our concept of "progress."
Thinking of the bioresource as a continuous store-
house helps us see "waste" as just another form of raw
material, waiting to be recycled into some productive
process.
The nature of the bioresource's limits-limits to pace,
to concentration, to consistency-points to ways to in-
crease the limits, through breeding and selection and
other synonyms of bioproductivity.
These conceptual changes in turn permit and even re-
quire individuals to exercise more choice. And because
all choices are interconnected, in dealing with the biore-
source the responsibility for outcomes is spread more
widely. On a farm, productivity is a function of num-
berless small personal efforts, often unsupervised; these
efforts cannot be optimized at the point of a gun, but
only by the willingness of the farmer himself to enhance
his efficiency in dozens of private and unstandardized
ways.
The wider the spread of personal responsibility for
outcomes, the more each participant in the management
In a bioresource-conscious world, therefore, manage-
ment will have a different "feel" to it: cooperation not
coercion, horizontal not vertical structures, nobody in
general charge but everybody partly in charge,
multiple-objective preferred to single-purpose organi-
zations.
More participatory decision-making implies a need
for much feedback information widely available. That
means more openness, less secrecy-not as an ideolo-
gical preference but as a technological imperative.
In such a management environment, "planning" can-
not be done with detailed blueprints. "Planning" has to
be improvisation by the many on a general sense of
direction, which is announced by "leaders" only after
consultation with those who will have to improvise on
it.
Integrative Thinking
Preparing people to participate responsibly in the
kind of management appropriate to the bioresource will
evidently require a wholesale review of existing educa-
tional systems. Their dedication to the separateness of
specialties may have to give way to an emphasis on inte-
grative, interdisciplinary, interprofessional, and inter-
national modes of analysis, since only these can be plug-
ged in directly to action on an interconnected resource.
Indeed, one casualty of the new emphasis on biore-
sources is likely to be traditional analytical systems, es-
pecially economics; in a laudable effort to be more rig-
orous, economics succeeded in being too narrow. A new
"Thinking of the bioresource as
a continuous storehouse helps
us to see `waste' as just another
form of raw material, waiting to
be recycled."
of the bioresource has to try to understand "the situa-
tion as a whole" of which his efforts can only be a very
small part.
Man's revised perceptions of the bioresource are pre-
sented here with their positive implications. But they all
imply change. That means the very nature of the biore-
source is a threat to existing beliefs, concepts, institu-
tions, and power structures.
The technological choices implied by these revised
perceptions leap to the eye. In the spectra of technolo-
gies by which resources are moulded to purpose, the
bioresource (as compared to nonliving resources) inher-
ently favors polyculture rather than monoculture; self-
sustaining systems rather than systems requiring more
and more energy input from the outside; "extensive"
rather than "intensive" systems (in terms of geography,
capital, or labor); economic, social, and cultural pat-
terns that encourage independence rather than depen-
dence (for nations, for groups, for individuals), the
spreading of benefits rather than the concentration of
wealth, the maximization of choice rather than the sup-
pression of diversity, and the diffusion of individual re-
sponsibility rather than hierarchical command and con-
trol.
analytical system, one with a wider lens, is going to be
needed to illuminate the technological choices and guide
the pluralistic management that the new perceptions of
the bioresource make both possible and necessary.
A wider frame of thinking, a wider participation in
management, a wider range of technological choice-to
take seriously these implications of the bioresource will
certainly mean changes in our minds and our habits. But
precisely because we are ourselves part of the biore-
source, we may find that adjusting our minds in the dir-
ections just indicated is much more "natural" than our
efforts, in this century, to adjust to space travel or tele-
communications-or to urban congestion, thickening
air, desertification, and the daily threat of global nu-
clear war. e'40
This article is excerpted from the Introduction to Bioresources for
Development: The Renewable Way of Life, edited by Harlan Cleve-
land and Alexander King with the assistance of Guy Streatfeild.
The book is based on an international conference on Bio-Potentials
for Development, held in Houston, Texas, November 5-11, 1978.
The book is to be published this year by Pergamon Press, Elmsford,
New York, and is scheduled to have about 300 pages and to cost
$30.00.
The book's authors, specialists in energy and bioresources,
recommend ecologically appropriate methods for the management
of resources and the production of food energy. Many new lines of
development are discussed, including suggestions for microbiologi-
cal methods of nitrogen fixation to reduce the use of chemical ferti-
lizers, a fish culture chain involving human effluents and algae, and
a call for better understanding of photosynthesis.
The book memorializes John McHale, the futurist sociologist
whose Center for Integrative Studies organized the Houston meet-
ing. The Center now continues to operate at the State University of
New York at Buffalo under the direction of Magda McHale. The
new address is Center for Integrative Studies, School of Architec-
ture and Environmental Design, State University of New York at
Buffalo, 108 Hayes Hall, Buffalo: New York 14214.
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