Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Lauren Kuby: We'll get started folks. Welcome to our Sustainability Series talk. It's great to see such a full house for Mr. Morrison. My name is Lauren Kuby, and I manage the events here at GIOS. I want to tell you about some upcoming events, including our case critical discussion. It's on the Navajo Generating Station, Coal Power Generating Station. It will be tomorrow. Typically, we have our events here, but we had to move it to Old Main because we have such intense interest in the event. We're hoping you'll come. It's been in the newspaper, but incorrectly reported. It's at noon tomorrow at Old Main. We urge you to attend and to also RSVP in our RSVP system.

Thursday, this coming Thursday, right here at 12 noon, we have another lunch. The topic is, "Is God Green? An Interfaith Response to Climate Change," that will be led by the co-director of Arizona Interfaith Power Light, Doug Bland. That's also a good one to attend. Next Tuesday, we have, "Who's Going to Get the Goodies Globally?" It's Vince Matthews, who's the Colorado State geologist. He's coming into town to make this presentation. It's very chilling, about our dwindling natural resources and minerals all over the globe. We're doing that in conjunction with the ASU Art Museum, the Cu29 Exhibit about copper. We'll have the artists Matthew Moore and Steve Semken , from our own Geological Sciences Department, talk about the integration of art, sustainability, and geology. It will be a really great talk and art exhibit as well.

I'd like to introduce Rob Melnick, my boss, who is the Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Global Institute of Sustainability. He's also a professor of practice in the School of Sustainability. Before leading us at GIOS, Rob was, for ten year, a decade or more, with the Morrison Institute. He's very well acquainted with our special guest, Richard Morrison. With that, I'd like to introduce Rob. [Applause].

Rob Melnick: Oh, yes, I guess you need them. You need the microphone on for this? Okay, fine, thanks. Thanks, Lauren. I, as most of you know, 'cause I'm seeing a lot of familiar faces here today. I introduce a lot of here at GIOS, but it's truly my pleasure and honor to introduce Richard as our speaker today, partially because Richard is a very dear friend of mine and I'm very close with his family. Also and more importantly in this context because of not just what Richard has to say, but because of the service and the care and the concern that he has had and his family has had for the well-being of people in Arizona for many generations now. I'm gonna do this without bullet points, Richard, and you're gonna correct me if I get this wrong. From naval pilot to attorney, who adjudicated Indian water rights for several decades—am I on target so far in the decades part?

Richard Morrison: Negotiated.

Rob Melnick: Negotiated, okay, right. To acting college president at one of the Claremont Colleges, to the ministry, to farming and agribusiness and many, many other things, Richard has been of service to Arizona and Arizonans in more ways than I can count. He continues to serve in that capacity today. Without further ado, I want to introduce my dear friend and colleague, Richard Morrison. [Applause].

Richard Morrison: Thank you, Rob. Well, thank you, Rob, and good afternoon everyone. I obviously want to begin by thanking and congratulating the administrators, the faculty, and staff and students for sponsoring the Sustainability Series. You have obviously had, and no doubt will continue to have, speakers representing a wonderful breadth of experience and thought. I can vouch for Doug Bland, who will be with you next, I think, in sequence. I happened to have the privilege of serving with Doug on the Arizona Ecumenical Council, which is one of the roles I fill as a clergyman. I know of his passion for the environment. You'll enjoy hearing Doug speak.

Owing to my early childhood on the farm and to my continuing involvement in the agricultural scene, I am often invited and really expected to represent an agricultural point of view wherever I go. Certainly, I do speak out of an experiential base that includes farming, ranching, and the dairy industry. This actually has nothing to do with me as far as I know.

Lauren Kuby: Do you have a PowerPoint?

Richard Morrison: I'm sorry? What?

Lauren Kuby: Do you have a PowerPoint?

Richard Morrison: No, no. As you can tell from the promotional material that's distributed in advance of this talk, I come today wishing to talk a little bit about agriculture. I also wish to emphasize the role of ethics or stated differently the role of intention, choice, vision, and even philosophy in ensuring that the common good is served in our country and, indeed, around the world. I will get to the philosophical and the ethical in the latter part of the presentation.

I'll begin from an agricultural perspective with a declaration about where the common good is for us. The common good begins for agriculturalists with ensuring simply that everyone has enough to eat. The most significant agricultural mission of all is to ensure there is enough food for a hungry world. This problem is not a future problem. We hear about the expectations in the growth of population around the world, but all too often, we turn a blind eye to the fact, the present fact, that over half of the people alive on the planet today are subsisting on incomes of under $2.00 a day per capita.

This is a present problem, especially where access to arable acreage and clean water are in many areas actually diminishing. Feeding the world has always been a noble goal, but greed, geography, governments, wars, weather, and what we sometimes call wilting willingness to achieve the goal have prevented this most basic of human aspirations from becoming a global reality. There are some new developments on the immediate horizon that will make the goal of feeding everyone all the more challenging and all the more frustrating. Challenging because the widening divide between the haves and the hungry will continue to separate a growing number of people around the world from an increasing limited supply of food. Frustrating because this global agricultural deficit comes, really, after a time of unparalleled technological and scientific advances, wonderments really, that have allowed us to grow bigger and better crops more quickly, more efficiently, more economically.

But in the U.S., we have nearly maxed out on the use of existing technologies to increase productivity. Plant scientists tell me that future gains in productivity from genetically modified organisms, which are themselves controversial, but the future gains from the use of GMOs will be a matter of much slower growth than we have experienced in the past few decades. Perhaps more to the point, it is frustrating to note the slow adoption rate of existing technologies in countries that need to increase productivity the most.

Many of these new challenges and somewhat complex dynamics are aptly spelled out in a series of reports published by Global Harvest Initiatives. I just happen to have a copy of the 2011 report here if somebody would like to peruse it after the talk. It's available for your review. Each year, for the last three years, this group has published what they call a GAP report. GAP standing for Global Agricultural Productivity. I'd like to allow some light to be thrown on the details from these reports.

First, as the GAP Reports wisely do, we need to look at the world from a population point of view. You all know this, but it bears repeating that by 2050 we have to feed two more Chinas, one more China by 2030. Of course, the population growth is not just in China. India will have more people than China by 2040, maybe sooner. As you begin to see, because of sheer numbers alone, feeding the world will be a monumental task today, tomorrow, and certainly in the years to come. The best minds I know in the agricultural research centers of the United States say we cannot do it given the current constraints on the use of technology and trade. That is a very troubling prospect.

Here's more relevant detail. Ninety percent of the population growth over the next 40 years will be in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. You're likely aware that these areas face numerous challenges, not the least of which is political uncertainty. Their base poverty in both income and agricultural productivity is a daily certainty, and it's something that agribusiness must tackle if the world is going to be able to feed itself.

As the GAP Reports explain, most of the poor people in these regions earn their paltry incomes and meager meals by farming small plots of land. Nearly 80 percent of their income is spent on food. By comparison, as you know, in the United States, we spend less than 10 percent of our income, our disposable income on food. Perhaps it's only that high because we eat out a lot.

Meanwhile in other parts of the world, many people are just hoping to eat. What do people around the world eat? Most of you know this, but cereals and root and tuber crops make up more than 60 percent of the world's diet. Animal proteins, meat and dairy and vegetable oils make up about a third. Now we get to something that's kind of interesting to debate. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization expects those numbers to shift in the coming years, with cereal grains and starchy roots and tubers to be reduced to about 50 percent of food consumption. Meat and dairy and vegetable oils will rise to almost 40 percent of the world's diet.

To some extent, this reflects an expectation of rising incomes in China and the fact that, so far at least, increased demand for animal protein always seems to follow increases in disposable income in impoverished areas. In some ways, rising income in some parts of the world will put even more pressure on food supplies in poorer areas through competition for the food and through using natural resources less efficiently, which is one unfortunate result of preferring animal protein.

I am a beef producer. You know that from the promotional material, but I cannot deny the efficiency arguments with respect to the use of resources, especially those related to the use of fresh water. Water is going to be the issue in most areas that are most in need of food. China, for example, is rapidly de-watering its aquifers through its groundwater pumping. Here in Arizona we know why that is a problem. These estimates I've discussed do not include fresh fruits and vegetables, for which, of course, we can also expect to see an increase in demand along with the demand for other commodities. As you know, agriculture is not just about food. It's an important source of fiber and energy and industrial raw materials.

The competition for the land and the water is intensifying, and its stands to threaten food production when the competition involves energy and industrial raw materials. We already see in our own country many people who are absolutely outraged that we are using so much corn for energy. Corn that could provide food to people who are starving. However, we do need to see clearly. Even if we were to double our agricultural output in the United States, it would not be enough to end hunger or undernutrition in the world. Nearly four percent of the population of developing countries, or nearly 300 million people, would still be undernourished even after we doubled out output.

I hope you are feeling some sense of urgency. The Global Agricultural Productivity Index I've been talking about, or GAP Index, measures the progress toward the goal of sustainably doubling the world's agricultural output by 2050. To meet that goal, we know that we need to grow agricultural production by an annual global rate of 1.75 percent. In 2010 and 2011, the agricultural global growth rate was actually approximately 1.4 percent, well below what is needed to feed the world.

If one looks at the variations by region, the 2010 GAP Report explains that in Sub-Saharan Africa their current growth rate will meet only 13 percent of the actual demand by 2030. Now you will get some debate about these assumptions. I have been in a recent meeting of agribusiness experts in which a very competent commentator reported an expectation that the world will have food surpluses in 20 years. Honestly, I don't know how. You already have over half the people in the world living on under $2.00 per day of income as I mentioned and most of them are hungry now. He said the forecast of shortages all assume that the Chinese will want to eat like we do in the United States. That means that we're assuming that 30 percent of them will be obese like us. Well, maybe that won't happen, but by any measure the world faces a daunting challenge to produce much more food, more and better food.

Of course, we must also remember that productive growth is linked to other challenges like environmental impacts, some of which, as I have already said, will challenge the availability of clean water, which is one of the biggest challenges for increasing food production around the world. It is true that new technologies, biotech crops, conservation tillage, drip irrigation, integrated pest management, precision agriculture, and multiple cropping practices have raised the efficiency and the productivity of agricultural resources over the last few decades.

The world must meet rising demand without growing agriculture's environmental footprint. We've got to grow more crops without using more gallons of water in this time of climate change and greater, thirsty populations. Even with new technology, the fact is technology is slow in reaching poorer nations, which are reluctant to spend already extremely limited financial resources on research and development that may take years to bring benefits.

While wealthier nations with developed economies, such as the United States, do have both public and private sectors heavily involved in agricultural research and development, agricultural policies are more focused on buffering producers from the effects of declining real prices than on feeding the world. The amount being devoted to research is now declining, particularly in shrinking government budgets for the same.

Each country's approach to increasing productivity has been different, but certain fundamental policies exist that are necessary to promote agricultural development. I will identify the five important policy priorities, which are emphasized in the GAP Report. The five universal essentials for feeding the world are: supporting research and development to create new science-based technologies, supporting the widespread adoption of these technologies, investing in critical infrastructure. I'll just say a sentence or two more about this one as I'm going through these bullet points. Critical infrastructure is so important because a third of the food in developing countries never makes it to market. It spoils first. As they say, poverty begins where the road ends.

The fourth important area for policy work is removing trade barriers and the fifth is fostering an environment that is conducive to private-sector investment in the agriculture and food sectors. Now, I suppose some of what gets emphasized as essentials in the GAP Report may seem self-serving in terms of the interests of U.S. producers of food and fiber. Certainly, we can acknowledge that the health of U.S. markets for agricultural commodities have been largely dependent upon exports for decades.

Our trade policy ends up being linked to sustainability goals in resource-depleted areas of the world, sometimes in ways that puts the two in tension with each other. Everyone knows that we must also consider the impacts of our exports on local markets in countries receiving our commodities. In actual fact, much of the production in poverty-stricken areas is believed to be sustainable. But for a variety of reasons, including social and political reasons, it does not produce enough to meet the needs of the people or the food that is produced is not fairly and efficiently distributed.

In any event, if the goal is to feed a hungry world, U.S. exports must expand, in part because U.S. commodities will increasingly be labeled as virtual water for those areas of the world that are depleting their groundwater supplies without available alternative sources of water for their own food production. Simply put, limited supplies of clean water and arable land are a huge constraint on increasing global food supplies.

Much of the water use around the world is already not sustainable, and the problem grows because of changes in global weather patterns. In short, there's a twofold problem globally. In some areas, production methods are sustainable but don't produce enough food. In other places, the production methods are not sustainable. Here in the United States, agricultural policy is mostly about making a plentiful food supply as inexpensive as possible to the consumer while at the same time maximizing the number of food choices available to consumers.

Elites sometimes fail to acknowledge that not everyone can afford to buy organic foods. There are, after all, about 38 million people living in U.S. households experiencing hunger or food insecurity. These are people who probably cannot afford to pay more for the food they eat. They rely on producers to keep the cost of food down, even if it means not abiding by best practice standards or not pursuing an organic standard. For their part, cheap food proponents sometimes fail to acknowledge that the move to a more healthful food supply has higher costs associated with it and lower efficiencies.

It was about 30 years ago that a farsighted cow-calf producer in Arizona resolved to form a cooperative intended to market Arizona natural beef in Arizona grocery stores. I had the privilege of working with this group on their legal affairs. I eventually learned of the reasons why their efforts failed. First, it was almost impossible to compete for shelf space in Arizona grocery stores. Second, even where the product was available, consumers were simply unwilling to pay more for natural beef. There was a cheaper competing product available.

To some extent, producers of natural beef and organically produced foods still have this problem, but, of course, there is now a real market for these things. Most people, talking about policy, generally endorse the idea that our system in the U.S. should respond to whatever the consumers want. That probably means policy should not unnecessarily inhibit either the organic producers or those who wish to use GMO technology and limited chemical applications to produce food as cheaply as possible. However, a statement like that is obviously highly debatable.

Through my trusteeship for the Farm Foundation in Chicago, I am deeply involved in a major national effort to get all the stakeholders involved in what we call a dialogue for food and agricultural policy for the 21st century. We're trying to find as much common ground as possible among people with very different agendas. Of course, somewhere in the middle of all of this, we must also consider the requirements of sustainability as far as U.S. production methods are concerned. More on that just a little later.

There are related ethical issues, very much in the limelight these days, for example, in the area of animal rights. From a producer's perspective, I can tell you the quality of debate would be enhanced if people who have never had any experience with agricultural production would make a basic distinction between what is ethical and what is totally unrealistic. It would be nice if they would also hold themselves accountable to the same standard they espouse for others. For a somewhat humorous example, I would suggest you look up on the internet the 2002 New York Times article by Michael Pollan, in which Mr. Pollan described how he purchased and raised a steer in order to gain a personal in-depth look at the cattle industry in the United States and to look at the challenges of raising that steer.

We're told that after the article appeared, Mr. Pollan received appeals from readers willing to pay large sums of money to buy and save that steer. Evoked an emotional response. One reader, he recalled, was a Hollywood producer, who wanted to let the animal graze on his lawn in Beverly Hills. "He kept coming after me," Mr. Pollan said, describing a crusade that culminated in an offer of a meal at a famous emporium of porterhouses in Brooklyn. He finally said, "Look, I'm coming to New York. We're going to have dinner at Peter Luger to discuss this." Pollan said, "I'm like, 'Excuse me,' we're going to have a steak dinner to discuss the rescue of this steer? How disconnected can we be?"

Well, animal rights may or may not be directly related to question about sustainable practices, but the movement is certainly having an impact on production methods. You can be sure of that. Notwithstanding both the occasional silliness and completely unrealistic expectations I sometimes hear and the frequent disregard of my own advice, that I sometimes experience when I urge a standard of public virtue, I want to put up a grand vision of what ethics could mean to everyone. Then look at some of the actual challenges and controversies now affecting agricultural, some of which do present ethical questions that are historically unprecedented, but all of which, give an opportunity to test notions of what ethical conduct requires.

I hope that some of you will remember the 1986 film, The Mission, which starred Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro. It was a film which, among other things, showed the horrible consequences of decision-making based on greed and self-interest alone. It depicted the true story of the division of land in South America between Portugal and Spain in the year 1750, a division accomplished by slaughtering indigenous people and seizing their lands. The disregard of the native peoples was a sad story already visited by Spain on our own land here, especially in the history of the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest.

But here is why I mention the film. Roland Joffé, the director of the film, said something really wonderful when explaining his motives for working on the film in the first place. He said, "We are a strange animal, so often destroying what we love for selfish ends and yet tantalized by the sense that there are other choices if only we had the strength to make them." Indeed, where will we find that strength? We are challenged as individuals to integrate our highest values into all aspects of life and work. It's a unity-of-life concept traditionally associated with a philosophical term not heard much anymore, that being virtue.

The concept assumes an attempt to envisage each human life as a whole, as a unity, whose character is or it may be virtuous. There is a utilitarian aspect to it. This is not virtue for virtue's sake. Rather, the goal is that people should go about their lives striving to be personally healthy and happy and at the same time they should also be striving to help others in the world around them be healthy and happy. It is a difficult vision that suggests that ethically, at least, an individual can be the same unified person all day long.

This requires consideration of personal ethics when in a situation that normally invokes what is referred to as social ethics. Social ethics work very differently than personal ethics, as you would know. Social ethics often involve a lower standard, reached after significant compromise. Importantly, it is a system of social ethics that is usually operative in the context of our work lives. Virtue ethics calls on persons to be of the same mind at work they are at home. There are obstacles to achieving this, and the social obstacles are the most obvious.

With credit to Alasdair MacIntyre, whom I'm about the quote, "The social obstacles derive from the way in which modernity partitions each human life into a variety of segments, each with its own norms and modes of behavior. So both childhood and old age have been wrenched away from the rest of human life and made over into distinct realms. All these separations have been achieved so that it is the distinctiveness of each and not the unity of the life of the individual who passes through those parts, in terms of which we are taught to think and to feel."

Now, admittedly, this idea of virtuous unity of life is a huge subject and before our thought strays toward the conclusion that it's really all too abstract, I will identify a point of entry into this idea, a specific example of how it might be possible to practice virtue ethics. It is an interesting example from the point of view of an individual, a businessman, and a lawyer, but I need to offer just a little bit more background before I give it.

I am a 30-year member and former director of the American Agricultural Law Association. In 1997, at the AALA conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota Supreme Court Justice John Simonett presented a wonderful talk entitled, "An Ethic for Agricultural Sustainability." He presented a paper with a heavy emphasis on environmental ethics and specifically what he called the land ethic. I was greatly influenced by his presentation and in the following year I wrote a paper entitled, "The Evolution of Environmental Ethics," which was ultimately published by the Denver Water Law Review. That paper had a broader focus than this talk because, among other things, it relied on the work of the Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, who observed that all living things exist in the midst of an environmental continuum, which ranges from the infinitely small to the infinitely large and also ranges, so far as we can tell, from the infinitely simple to the infinitely complex.

Teilhard was eventually kicked out of the Jesuit order for, among other things, writing that molecules make love. But he had an important point because it reminds us of interdependence and the importance of all kinds of relationships, some cosmic, some global, some microscopic. Teilhard said wherever a living organism is on this environmental continuum, it is constantly engaged in the struggle to determine how to relate to other life. We can't really do justice to that concept today; however, the land ethic seems an appropriate concern for agricultural people and agricultural lawyers because, after all, most of their clients are either working the land or handling products that come from it.

Moreover, a land ethic is vitally important, not only to producers and consumers alive today, but to unborn generations. Our practices and policies must take care of the land, the water, and the air. Here's the aspect of ethical practice with respect to the environment. When agricultural producers take care of the earth, we are doing so not only as business people dependent upon its bounty but also as consumers depending upon its life-giving nutrients, and as individuals concerned about our own health.

The land ethic is kind of a good illustration, albeit one of the more simple and obvious examples of how the values we hold as individuals should inform the values we adopt in our business practices. The ethic invoked in this context is starting to win significant influence in corporate sustainability policies and here are three reasons why the environmental ethic matters. First, our land ethic will impact our health. There's no question about it.

Certainly, we all have a better understanding of health risks than we had even a few years ago and if nothing else gets our attention our health should do so. Many farmers I know, who have been exposed to herbicides and pesticides over extended periods of time, are now openly wondering if their current health problems have resulted from their own negligence and lack of knowledge in earlier times. Perhaps no one knows for sure, but whether they openly speak of it often or not, I assume people are more interested in finding healthy foods, clean water, and clean air than ever before.

Second, there's a concern about the possibility that the developed world is creating an environmental debt that cannot be repaid. We are reminded of the jolting phrase, "in the long term we are all dead." This famously quoted phrase comes from the Great Depression era and is attributed to John Maynard Keynes. It was in the 1930s with many people jobless, hungry, and searching for answers that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was looking for a solution. Keynes presented the idea that the government should take responsibility and provide employment, even if it meant accruing a large national debt.

At the time, excessive government spending to provide for citizens seemed like a solution to the nation's problems. Keynes was very aware of the long-term effect of accruing this amount of public debt, but he, at least, was unconcerned about the long-term effects and demonstrated his unconcern by using the phrase, "in the long term we're all dead." Suffice it to say the world cannot afford that kind of attitude with respect to the long-term or permanent environmental debt we may be creating, whether it is through global warming, polluted waters, or otherwise.

You don't need justice theory to make the case against environmental debt, but I would add that in almost anyone's conception of things, one of the six primary doctrines of economic justice is that consideration be given to the needs of unborn generations. Now I must try to quickly explain why I put so much emphasis on one's personal intention in assessing the ethical quality of our actions. It is not because intention always translates to the desired effects or because I think we're particularly good at forecasting the consequences of our choices. It is because I do know that intention matters to the results of human activity.

As a lawyer, I like to admit there are ample reasons to believe that behaving ethically requires substantially more than merely complying with the law and that the law itself may lag behind what the world needs as normative behavior. A ready example is available in the context of environmental regulation. It is an example that came to me in my work as a water lawyer. It just jumped off the page when I saw it some years ago. Now, you need to know that all 50 states in the U.S. now have what are called TMDL programs. That's short for Total Maximum Daily Load programs, measuring pollutants in rivers and streams. These were promulgated under the Clean Water Act.

They are an attempt to manage the water quality of rivers and streams by considering, monitoring, and regulating human activities across an entire watershed. Yet, according to Steve Neugeboren, who was acting associate general counsel of EPA when this example was given, after 35 years under the Clean Water Act there were still 60,000 waters in the United States that did not meet the Clean Water Act standards. Of those, the EPA assessed that only 10,000 still had any hope of further improvement. Most shocking of all, less than five waters were better off than they had been ten years before due to TMDL standards.

I think TDML standards were a good faith effort to improve the nation's water quality, but sometimes, don't you see, law becomes an excuse to let somebody else solve the problem. Or worse, law becomes a smokescreen, designed to make it appear that collectively we're working to solve a problem while individually we are not. Since I am stressing the importance of an ethical intention for the common good, I will declare my conviction that a part of the problem with reaching TDML standards was simply the unwillingness of some people to accept any personal responsibility with respect to the achievement of the goals. There was no intention to be helpful and they got away with it because TDML regulations were intended as a regulatory approach where point-of-discharge regulations were not possible or were inapposite.

I think I want to say one more thing about the role of law in our society as there are some who may believe that public virtue requires nothing more than conforming to the requirements of the law. That would be a minimum standard, to be sure, but also a relatively poor one when one considers that the law is of necessity incomplete. You see, in our system of laws, we all know the nation does not attempt to legislate all that is moral, for example.

Not everything as to which a criminal code is silent is considered to be moral. Not everything that is immoral is rendered criminal. That is why the individual virtue of the voters and the persons elected is vitally important to the welfare of all who are served by government. There is just a huge gap between what is legislated and what is desired. In fact, thoughtful commentators frequently note that the founders had no need of inserting what for them was an obvious truth, that the pursuit of the common good was and would continue to be a major motivation of all citizens.

I told you I had this specific example out of an agricultural context, of people using rule and regulations to their advantage, actually, without adhering to the spirit and the intention of the law. It's an example of how some dairy producers have tried to skirt the ethical vision and the intent of regulations to benefit from consumer preference for natural products. As you would know, many people see grass-fed beef or organic farming as a better alternative to factory farming, what is called factory farming.

My example relates to the national organic program and the much-debated regulations on ruminative access to pasture. For a long time, Title VII of the Code of Federal Regulations, Section 205, simply stated that a producer of organic livestock must allow the animals access to the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, and direct sunlight suitable to the species, its stage of production, the climate, and the environment. In addition to those things, access to pasture for ruminants.

Until the year 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture did not specify what access meant nor did the regulations identify a specific amount of time in which animals should be put out to pasture. I happened to know a dairy producer who had pasture, and he claimed his animals had access to it, but, in fact, the animals were very seldom in the pasture. He opened the gate, but the animals seldom went out to the pasture because there was no shade out there. It was usually 112 degrees outside.

The point of this is this producer thought that he qualified for an organic label, and he sold his milk as such. Naturally, groups like the Organic Consumers Association petitioned the USDA to amend the regulation in order to assure animals actually grazed on the grass. Suffice it to say individuals who engage in organic production should not be looking for loopholes in the regulations. They should be trying to uphold the spirit of the regulations.

The producer who sees this issue purely as a personal decision that has no larger implications is simply not thinking ethically. I've said to lawyers that if this practice comes to their attention in their capacities as advisors to such producers, they should say so. In other words, they should emphasize the intention of the law and the intended benefits of it. In any event, if there are those among you who think organic production methods are more sustainable than conventional production methods, I presume you are expecting people to follow the rules. Well, maybe they will and maybe they won't. In the end, the choice comes down to intention.

I think I'm going to move toward the end of my formal remarks by looking at the climate in which agribusiness functions along with all other business. A recently book, entitled The Puritan Gift, Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst the Global Financial Chaos, argues that there are four characteristics of the golden age of management in companies like General Motors, General Electric, and IBM, one of which was a moral outlook that subordinated the interests of the individual to the group.

Kenneth and William Hopper, the authors of this book wrote that the greatest American companies were never solely motivated by profit. They had at their core a commitment to benefit the common good, an ethos of the manager as servant and an aversion to extravagance and ostentations. One example they cite is a famous pure research conducted by Bell Labs, which produced 16 Nobel prizes in 50 years. A subsequent generation of managers, obsessed with short-term, measurable results, gutted this effort.

Today, all too often, it seems that American business substitutes financial engineering for product engineering, making profit on paper instead of the factory floor. Whether that is a fair characterization or not, here's something you can count on. In the midst of it all, agribusiness remains committed to producing and distributing food and fiber to those who need and want it. American agricultural productivity remains the envy of the world.

Indeed, it can be argued that the root of all economy is agriculture, and that agriculture remains the strength of America. For American families it is the surplus available after meeting their food needs that makes most other parts of the economy possible, including all of those sectors dependent upon discretionary spending. However, U.S. resources are not inexhaustible either, and so sustainable practices are as important here as they are anywhere.

It is the intention of business leaders and other decision makers that will implement sustainable practices. The interplay between an individual and a social ethic that will hold our intentions accountable to the common good is in everyone's best interest now and in the future. There is good news in that many large companies are now paying attention to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and progressive companies are defining what it means to be environmentally ethical. They have answered the call of the public for better and more environmentally friendly technology. The Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes are being published to rate companies in the way they integrate economic, environmental, and social criteria into their business plans. This index was launched on September 15, 2001 and of last year the assets managed in portfolios rated by the index amounted to about six billion U.S. dollars.

Agricultural companies are also increasingly following the call to sustainability. Unilever, Xylem, Life Technologies, Dow Chemical, DENISCO, Tyson Foods, Kraft Foods, and Archer Daniel Midland are examples. These, of course, are very big companies being rated in their overall performance. We don't yet have a rating mechanism for individual choices being made by individual producers of food and fiber. For a vision and a goal, I like the ethic and the example set by Atlanta-based Interface, Inc. and it's founder Ray Anderson, who aimed for his company to have a zero impact on the environment, meaning no waste returned.

In closing, I want to endorse the Humanities for the Environment Initiative of ASU's Institute for Humanities Research. A recent story about this published by Ashley Humphrey recited, "To reduce the impact of the human footprint on the earth requires numerous changes in the way we think about what it means to be human, what it means to be on the planet with other species, what it means to truly care about and plan for the future. The humanities contribute a great deal to the overall solution, but what needs to happen is collaboration among people of different knowledge bases."

I think that is exactly right, and I think my choice of subject demonstrates my own conviction about the importance of this effort from the perspective of the humanities. After all, ethics has commonly been studied as one of the offerings in a department of philosophy. Yet it is making its mark on law and business, and that is exactly the way it should be.

Here is my essential point about ethics. It cannot be enough that we know how to talk about environmental ethics. Ethical people possess an internal disposition that will sustain ethical practices. It is a disposition that will enable us to overcome the harms, the dangers, the temptations, and the distractions which discourage us from ethical practices. This is the proper role of virtue, public or private. When sustainability is our focus, the true victim of any failure of ethics will be the natural and the social world that nourishes and sustains us. Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak today and to endorse your work. [Applause].