SUSTAINABLE COMMERCE

MANY AMERICANS described September 11th, 2001 as "the day everything changed". In this context, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were depicted as the opening act of a "clash of civilizations" between the modern society in the West and the backward, impoverished Muslim world of

What few Americans understand is that it was the success of militant Islam in the past that helped make the West into the global powerhouse that it is today. The parallels between that time and this are instructive about the possible future for sustainable business.

With the exception of the past 200 years, the world's economy has always been dominated by Asia. For millennia, China and India led the world in agricultural production, manufacturing and wealth. Their economic engines drove the global economy.

Western Europe, on the other hand, was a mere backwater whose poor, squabbling kingdoms battled each other tor access to the riches of the East. Only through the portal of the "Middle" East could the West bring its meager goods to trade for the finely crafted textiles, porcelains (still termed "china" to this day), spices and wrought metals of India, China and the rest of Asia.

In the seventh and eighth centuries, however, the unifying power and expansion of militant Islam had tremendous impact on Europe's access to the wealth of Asia. As the Mohammedan armies swept across the Middle East, northern Africa and up to the Straits of Gibraltar, they gained control of the sea lanes and overland trade routes that had connected the embryonic economies of Western Europe with Asia's markets. The Mongols provided a safe means to travel east to China outside the Arab zone of influence (the route Marco Polo was to take), but when the Mongol empire collapsed at the end of the 14th century, that door was closed as well.

Desperate to gain unimpeded access to Asia's wealth, the Iberian kingdoms went to sea. Beginning in 1416, the Portuguese king Henry the Navigator sent ships each year to explore the coast of Atrica and establish a trade route to the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Following suit, in 1492, the Spanish sent Christopher Columbus west to find a direct path to the East. Although Columbus ramously tailed (though he still termed the inhabitants he found "Indians"), in 1498 Vasco da Gamma completed the Portuguese quest by rounding the Cape ot Good Hope and setting anchor in the ports of India.

Of greater importance than the goal of their efforts, however, was what they found on the way. Columbus, of course, found a "new world" whose inhabitants' weapons technology wasn't as advanced and who lacked immunity to European diseases thereby making the wealth of two continents ripe tor plundering. Da Gamma had found, in African slaves, the labor source that could be used to build and work the mines and plantations of Columbus's new world. In combination, exploitation of the natural wealth of the Americas and the human wealth of Africa would launch Europe.

Two centuries after Europe achieved that dominance, the productive powers of China, India and the rest of Asia are again rising toward becoming the focal point of the world economy. In the meantime, radical Islamic forces appear poised, once more, to block the West's cheap access to oil, the commodity most vital to current economic life.

The confluence of these two factors could return the West to its historically secondary role in world affairs. In the wake of such an inversion, the opportunity to plunder two continents and enslave a third as a path to economic power will not be possible. Exploitation of that scale will no longer be available as a means of attaining or maintaining our position. This is becoming increasingly true with the political revival of Central and South America whose stated aim is to secure a fairer deal in their economic relations with Europe and the United States. Denied access to uncompensated human and natural wealth, the West must look elsewhere.

Once second to Asia's treasure and obstructed from access to vital commodities by Islamic forces, the West took the road less traveled sending explorers in uncharted directions to find new pathways to wealth. The results profoundly changed the world, liberating new productive forces while subjugating much of the human and ecological community.

The cycle of history appears to be repeating only this time denying wholesale exploitation as an option to radically changing the economic order. What remains then is the opportunity to once again embark in uncharted directions to discover ecological and human wealth that can support and transform the productive forces of our economy. Our best path toward achieving this is through the discovery of the new world that sustainahlc industries, agriculture and communities will unveil. The entrepreneurs, researchers and government officials who are mapping out the contours of this new economy are the explorers of our time whose motto could be words Columbus himself once spoke: "Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World".