The Natural Step
What one person can do: The story of Karl-Henrik Robèrt

Reported by Walt Hays
Reprinted with permission from TIMELINE, Issue No. 20 March/April 1995

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I was skeptical. When the Foundation was asked to cosponsor an "interactive public event" featuring Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt of Sweden, we were told that he had managed to bring "the scientists of an entire nation to consensus on the roots of our environmental problems and the most critical avenues for action," and also to distribute an educational packet on that consensus to every school and household in Sweden. It seemed to good to be true, but we decided to accept the cosponsorship and go see for ourselves.

Incredibly, it turned out to be all true and more! Starting in 1988, with an attempt to seek consensus from a few colleagues on the conditions for sustainability, Dr. Robèrt's initiative has grown into a movement called "The Natural Step". Among many other accomplishments, it has established 17 networks of various professionals "for the Environment" (e.g., Scientists, Doctors, Business Leaders, etc.), comprising more than 8,000 people; it has obtained the commitment of the leading industries in Sweden to comply with the four "system conditions" of sustainability and educate their employees; and it has sponsored a "Youth Parliament," featuring an interactive television broadcast to 150,000 youth in schools. In short, it is real, and it offers a beacon of hope in a world which for the most part seems to be rushing headlong toward what Dr. Robèrt calls an environmental "abyss."

The story is a powerful affirmation of the principle that one person can make a difference. However, Dr. Robèrt disclaims the credit, describing himself only as a catalyst who helped people come to consensus by focusing on areas of agreement instead of areas of dispute. As he puts it, most scientific disputes over the environment are like "monkey chatter in the leaves of a dying tree," when the need is to focus on restoring the trunk and branches.

At the time he launched his initiative, Dr. Robèrt was head of the leading cancer research institute in Sweden. Working on a daily basis with human cells, he took in two basic facts at the gut levelthat the conditions for life in cells are "nonnegotiable" and that in virtually all respects the cells of plants, animals, and humans are identicali.e., we are part of nature. Having been imprinted with the simplicity of the conditions for life, Robèrt became frustrated with the out-of-touch complexity of most scientific debate on environmental issuese.g., what is the threshold at which PCBs harm the reproductive organs of seals? In his words, arguing on such peripheral issues is like a householder, whose home is being flooded by several open faucets, ignoring the faucets and arguing over whether the water has reached the threshold to the next room.

It was a culmination of such thoughts and frustrations that led Dr. Robèrt to "daydream" for several months about the prospect of sidestepping the complexity and instead seeking fundamental areas of agreement. Finally, determined to take some action even if it meant "dashing his head against a wall," he wrote a paper on the basic conditions for a sustainable human society. Although he now admits that he felt the paper represented "The Truth" on the issue, he circulated the draft to a few of his scientific colleaques for confirmation. He immediately encountered a fundamental principle of human naturethe irresistible temptation to correct another's workand received many suggested revisions. At that point, instead of defending his original conclusions, which he concedes was his natural tendency, he decided to incorporate the suggestions and do another draft, which he recirculated further. After repeating this process through 21 drafts, he emerged with a consensus paper.

Dr. Robèrt's dream was to communicate the consensus paper to all schools and households in Sweden. He had no idea if that was possible, but having succeeded in the seemingly impossible task of bringing scientists to consensus, he decided to go for it. Once again, the process was an inspiration. He first approached a friend who was a popular television entertainer, told her of his vision to obtain the necessary sponsorship for a nationwide educational program, and asked whether she would help launch it on TV, if Dr. Robèrt succeeded in pulling the program together. When she said yes, he asked for references to other entertainers, whom he approached with the same message. He then went to the government Department of Education, told them of his support from leading entertainers, and asked if the Department would support him if he succeeded, again obtaining conditional commitment.

He repeated the same process with all groups needed to achieve his goalSwedish television, the King, and finally corporate sponsors. After some sleepless nights over apparent dead ends, he finally saw the project come together. Funds were raised to distribute copies of a pamphlet and audiotape on the consensus statement to every school and household in Sweden4.3 million copies, reaching 8.7 million people. And in the process, the corporate leaders who sponsored the program became the founding board of The Natural Step.

In describing the consensus that was reached, Dr. Robèrt starts with two basic laws of physicsthe Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Principle of Conservation of Matter. In lay terms, all structures run down over time without a new input of energy; and matter-energy is neither created nor destroyed, i.e., nothing goes away. Applying these principles to evolution, Dr. Robèrt notes that our planet started out as a toxic stew, and over billions of years the sun, working primarily through green cells, converted and organized these materials into our beautiful living world. While all things continue to decay, sun-driven cyclical processes enable them to reorganize. In Dr. Robèrt's, while all living processes deplete the quality of resources, the sun and green cells constitute a "quality machine" with incredible power to rebuild and reorganize.

For roughly the last hundred years, however, humans have been disrupting the cyclical processes of nature by perfecting and imposing our own linear processes, converting sun-built resources into "dispersed junk," faster than nature can absorb, and too often in forms that nature cannot absorb. Accordingly, "as we busy ourselves tearing down more than we rebuild, we are racing toward worldwide poverty in a monstrous, poisonous garbage dump." In effect, we are reversing the process of evolution.

In turning to the implications of these basic facts, Dr. Robèrt notes that none of us has the capacity, in making daily decisions on everyday issues, to take in their implications for the whole living system. We therefore need a "checklist"a series of simple guidelines. Those principles, which Dr. Robèrt calls "the four system conditions," are the following:

1. Nature cannot "take" (i.e., withstand) a systematic buildup of dispersed matter mined from the earth's crust (e.g., minerals, oil, etc.).

2. Nature cannot take a systematic buildup of persistent compounds made by man (e.g., PCBs, etc.).

3. Nature cannot take a systematic deterioration of its capacity for renewal (e.g., harvesting fish faster than they can replenish, converting fertile land to desert or asphalt, etc.).

4. Therefore, if we want life to go on, we must be (a) efficient in our use of resources and (b) just-in the sense of promoting justicebecause ignoring poverty will lead the poor, for short-term survival, to destroy resources that we all need for long-term survival (e.g., the rainforests).

Translated into practical terms, a company subscribing to these four conditions would have to phase out its use of petroleum products and unrecycled minerals; cease using all nonbiodegradable compounds; monitor all its processes to ensure no net degradation of renewable capacity; make resource conservation and waste minimization a major priority; and be willing to pass on lessons learned to developing countries, free if necessary.

At first glance, convincing corporations to make such radical decisions would seem like a hard sell. But this is where Dr. Robèrt's remarkable insight comes into play. In making presentations to business leaders, he does not talk about saving the environment but instead uses phrases like "investing for the future." In an introductory explanation of the four system conditions, he notes that they are nonnegotiable-i.e., we cannot avoid compliance in the long run. Accordingly, the conditions constitute a "funnel" of hard reality, in the sense that companies that do not comply with them will eventually "hit the wall" and go bankrupt. Conversely, companies that see the wall coming and invest to avoid it will prosper. Furthermore, he recognizes that demanding that companies meet the conditions overnight would brand him as an impractical "fundamentalist." He therefore asks only that companies adopt compliance as a long-term goal, with practical interim steps. Finally, he does not pretend to prescribe the changes companies must make; instead, he describes the system conditions as a "compass" and affirms the fact that company leaders know best how to apply them to their businesses.

If it all still seems too good to be true, we need only consider some of the success stories. ICA, a major Swedish supermarket chain, began to get increasing questions about whether their refrigerators and freezers emitted CFCs that harm the ozone layer. (Dr. Robèrt uses the term "hard freons.") Its leaders, who were among Dr. Robèrt's early backers, sensed that they were heading toward the wall of the funnel and therefore opened a dialogue with Electrolux, another Swedish company and ICA's principal supplier of such products.

The ICA executives asked their Electrolux counterparts how much it would cost to eliminate hard freons from existing inventory, and the reply was that it would cost one billion Swedish crowns to convert them to "soft" freons. Being familiar with the four system conditions, the president of ICA asked whether soft freons were "persistent" (i.e., non-biodegradable), and after some technological hedging (which Dr. Robèrt describes as an attempt to shift the conversation "from the trunk to the leaves"), the answer was yes. The president of ICA then responded that soft freons violate system condition number two and therefore have no future. The dialogue ended with ICA demanding that Electrolux come up with a plan to eliminate freons entirely.

At that point Electrolux, which had not previously heard of The Natural Step, called and asked Dr. Robèrt to come and talk about "your damned system conditions." After hearing his presentation, the chief engineer of Electrolux argued that soft freons would meet the conditions because they use less energy. In response, Dr Robèrt asked the fundamental question of the four system conditions and then what? And in explanation he noted that while using less energy meets condition number four (efficiency), it still violates condition number two (no persistent compounds), which would mean eventually hitting the funnel wall. In total exasperation, the engineer replied, "Do you think it is easy to make refrigerators?" Despite their frustration, however, the Electrolux team called back two weeks later to say that they had found an interim compound that was still persistent but did not harm the ozone layer, and they are already well on their way to producing a compound that is biologically harmless. They also joined The Natural Step and undertook to train all of their employees.

The ICA-Electrolux dialogue is only one of many examples of the success of The Natural Step. For example, IKEA, one of the world's leading furniture manufacturers, now offers a line that complies with the system conditions. It contains no metal or persistent glues and is built of wood harvested by sustainable forestry, which in the case of forests in developing countries includes investment in a long-term livelihood for those dependent on the forest. One couch, designed for those with little or no garden space, even includes a hidden container for worm compost! The Swedish McDonald's is monitoring its compliance with the conditions and advertising the percentages it has achieved on its biodegradable tray covers. Paper companies, finding unexpected customer acceptance, have switched almost entirely to papers free of chlorine bleach. Even the Swedish oil company has recognized that it will eventually hit the wall and is actually lobbying for increased gas taxes to finance research into alcohol fuels.

To achieve these results, Dr Robèrt and his colleagues with The Natural Step have developed a systematic approach. When dealing with a noninvolved corporation, they first find an employee who is interested and willing to ask the company's executives to come to a two-hour presentation on a topic such as "Investing for Tomorrow's Market." So far, every company that has allowed such a presentation has signed up to participate. The next step is a full day of training with case studies for top and middle managers, after which a workbook is distributed in preparation for two more days of training. The managers then assume responsibility for training the rest of their employees, initially using videotapes of Dr Robèrt to explain the system conditions, but eventually making their own presentations. The number of trainers is now 1500 and growing.

The Natural Step has also undertaken the development of additional consensus papers on specific issues, including energy, metal flows, medical care, transportation, agriculture, political and economic measures, and even cultureall of which are in the process of being translated into English. In each case Dr. Robèrt and his colleagues have adhered to the same principles that enabled him to succeed with his first paper. First, by avoiding the "leaves," where scientists too often disagree, and instead focusing on the "trunk and branches" of basic principles, they find much broader agreement than the participants thought possible.

Second, when they run into opposition, The Natural Step leaders don't fight it, but instead ask for advice on how to make their statement better. According to Dr Robèrt, that request almost always leads to a constructive contribution and a better producteither because the proposed draft was wrong and needed to be corrected; or it was correct but unclear and therefore misunderstood; or in some cases, it was opposed because the input of a particular person had not been sought. In about ten percent of the cases, the opponent remains opposed, and in those cases Dr. Robèrt advises moving on, since scientists agree that only 15 percent of a population need to be convinced to achieve a paradigm shift.

The Swedish Natural Step is eager to share its ideas. Presentations have been made in a number of other countries in Europe, and Swedish McDonald's is reportedly discussing its program with its US counterpart. One would hope that presentations to most American companies would draw the same positive response as in Sweden. If we "build" the opportunities for such presentations, "they (Dr. Robèrt and his colleagues) will come." For the sake of our children and the whole chain of life, why not start?

For information, contact Dr. Laraine Lomax, Coordinator, The Natural Step US, 3rd Floor, The School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, (301) 405-4765, fax (301) 314-9346.