| ECOTECTURE:
Interesting. Have you had opportunities to give similar talks to management
groups in other industries?
CAPRA: Yes. I talk to corporate executives, usually in the context
of institutions that organize seminars where people from all kinds
of companies come. For instance, there’s an institution in
Canada called the Banff Management Center in Banff in Alberta, which
is very beautifully situated in the mountains. I regularly give
seminars there. Also, I gave a talk to an organization called the
Organizational Development Network, an international network of
companies—and various others. That’s where I discuss these
ideas.
ECOTECTURE: Do you think the—I
can’t think of a better word—the stuckness, the immobility
or the inability to change of these top executives or other people,
do you think it’s due to fear or vested interest? Do you have
any ideas about their inability to change?
CAPRA: It’s a complicated problem. It’s a complex structure.
It is certainly part of fear or maybe some kind of inertia, some
kind of laziness and inertia. They don’t really want to get
into a new field, they’ve had all their training in one field
so why should they get into a new field? It’s also fear that
they don’t really know much about this; will they be smart
enough to understand it? But also I think even more so, most of
the reason comes from the daily pressures that if you are a top
executive or a manager at any level today in any company, you have
to hand in quarterly reports, you are asked about market share and
you are asked about salary structures and the bottom line and the
competitive nature of what you’re doing. Today the competition
is global, so it’s not just another company in the same town;
you might have to compete with a company in Poland or Sri Lanka.
It’s a global competitive game. These pressures are enormous.
|
I tell people that they
do have choices. They
can take time off and
organize themselves
in such a way that
they're not always
in this rat race.
|
Also a very curious phenomenon which I describe in the book is
that because of the sophisticated technology that we use in our
businesses today, we don’t work less, as you might think—because
machines, supposedly, were invented originally to save us time,
to make things faster—but we actually work more. So people
at many levels have to cut costs, have eliminated secretaries and
assistants who would type things and mail things, and people do
it themselves because they send it by e-mail. So all the contacts
are written by e-mail, and so an executive comes home at eight or
nine o’clock at night and spends an hour answering his or her
e-mail. They go to work at seven o’clock to beat the morning
rush hour traffic and have their first corporate meeting at seven
instead of at ten. It all feeds into itself, and people work more
and more. So they have very little time, actually, to think and
reflect on what they’re doing and plan how they could live
better and work better. This is the reason why management schools
like the Banff Management Center are located in beautiful areas
in the mountains, where people are not all the time on their cell
phone and doing their e-mail. They really get out to breathe and
to think and to reflect, and they really appreciate that.
ECOTECTURE: Do they seem to respond well to that?
CAPRA: Yes, absolutely.
ECOTECTURE: That’s good to know . . . . . What can one do
to change the values that are so deeply entrenched and so "rewarding"
or self-reinforcing to the corporate elite and the wealthy? Before
you answer, let me surmise that part of your answer will be that
we can educate people, but point out that there already is an educational
establishment that is designed especially for the children of those
classes. What I’m wondering is, and this will lead I’m
sure to some discussion of the Center of Ecoliteracy, but—again,
coming back I guess to the issue of how, given those constraints
that you just talked about, the busyness of people, their inability,
their fear and so on—how can we break through to those people
or do we even bother to break through to those people or just go
straight . . . . .
CAPRA: Actually, what I tell people is that the things that we
value at the deepest level, and this becomes more and more clear
today, just having time to go for a walk, to spend with your children,
to reflect about things, to go to an opera or a concert or an art
exhibition, to engage in enjoying art or even being creatively artistic
oneself, to breathe clean air and drink clean water—the simple
pleasures of life that really make us human are the most endangered
today and are the most difficult to get. I tell people that they
do have choices. They can take time off and organize themselves
in such a way that they’re not always in this rat race.
For instance, just switching off the television is a very good
way to start because with the kind of television we have now, you
don’t really gain anything from watching TV. You don’t
learn anything, you’re just being manipulated to watch the
commercials, with rare exceptions which you can also have on video,
you don’t gain anything by having television. You can also
switch off your cell phone at least sometimes. I may be an extreme
case, but I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t use e-mail
and I don’t have TV. So these things that put enormous pressure
on people, I just decided not to have them. I lose something, you
know. It’s often inconvenient not to be able to communicate
with e-mail, and it’s inconvenient . . . . for instance, I
love tennis and when the Wimbledon or the US Open is on, I would
love to have TV. But the rest of the time I’m better off without
it and on balance, I’m much better off without it. The same
with e-mail and cell phones. If I drive to the airport and I want
to know whether my flight is on time, it would be good to have a
cell phone. But most of the time I’m happier without it. So
one can make these choices.
ECOTECTURE: One still has those choices. How does it work with
you and your daughter not having a television?
CAPRA: Oh, my daughter is now 16 and we raised her completely without
television, and we thought there would be big problems but there
was no problem whatsoever.
ECOTECTURE: I see.
CAPRA: She does watch TV occasionally when she is with friends
in their houses, and she did so over the years. But then she also
tends to hang out with people who don’t watch TV very much.
They watch movies, they have the VCRs and their movies, so she doesn’t
really—and now at 16, she is at an age where she sees the reason
why we raised her without TV. So when she watches television, she
sees how people are manipulated, how the commercials support violence
and competitiveness and all kinds of values that she doesn’t
like. So I think that has been very successful.
ECOTECTURE: I think they also support the notion that you’re
not okay if you don’t have . . . things.
CAPRA: Right, material consumption.
ECOTECTURE: I want to be okay, you want to be okay. But how do
you be okay? Well, you go out and buy and SUV and that makes you
okay. As opposed to going out and, say, fixing up your garden or
reading a book. That’s scary.
CAPRA: Absolutely.
END OF PART TWO
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