The Value of Capacity
The figure of $1 trillion has been around my thinking for a long time. I remember discussing it with Reuters and watching the conversation around that scale of investment grow. What interested me then, and still does, wasn't how large the number sounded. It was what it could actually do.
Working in the Middle East gave that scale a different perspective.
I have watched enormous resources move behind ideas that only a few years earlier would have seemed almost impossible. The transformation of entertainment and culture in Saudi Arabia is something I have experienced at close quarters. What interested me wasn't the amount being spent but what happened when ambition and economic capacity moved together. It changed more than an industry. It changed the cultural landscape of a nation and the way that nation positioned itself to the rest of the world.
My working life has put me inside very different environments. I have never seen much difference between a concert and a conference because of the labels we give them. A Biennale has no greater worth to me than a carnival. What matters is why people have come together and whether the environment created for them allows that purpose to happen.
That has meant walking in the shoes of the people arriving rather than deciding for them what should matter. It has also meant understanding capacity. The quiet doesn't compete with the spectacle. It supports it. An environment has to leave something available for what happens next.
Years spent looking at the environmental impact of the industry I worked in took that observation somewhere else.
We take from the natural world. We always have. The economic environment we have created could not exist without doing so, and I see little value in judging ourselves for enjoying what that has made possible.
What matters is whether the capacity remains to do it again.
While working in Saudi Arabia I went looking for somewhere to swim and met a date farmer called Jerome. He took me through the oases around Al-Ahsa and showed me places where he had swum as a child.
Much had changed.
One thing he told me stayed with me. Water had been pumped away into the desert because nobody valued it.
The water hadn't lost its value.
The environment making the decision simply didn't recognise it.
That observation sits comfortably with something else I've seen from inside businesses over many years. Economic value isn't always created by extraordinary ideas. Some very successful businesses simply understand something people need and make sure it continues to work.
There is enormous value in keeping something working.
We've all lived within an economic environment. Most of us depend upon it and many of us have benefited from it. I have. I don't see a reason to ask people to abandon it.
The economic environment has created extraordinary capacity of its own. I've seen what happens when that capacity moves behind something people decide matters. The opportunity isn't to turn the natural world into another economic product. Its value existed long before our economic environment and will exist long after it. What interests me is something different. Can the economic activity we already value underpin the regeneration of the natural world?
I believe it can. That takes me back to the $1 trillion. The number interests me less now. Not because it has become small, but because we have repeatedly demonstrated our ability to move resources on that scale when something matters enough to us. Nor do the people capable of doing that need to become environmentalists. There is something much more interesting in recognising what they have already created and what that capacity could now make possible.
For years we have tried to find ways of bringing the natural world into the economic environment. I am increasingly interested in movement in the other direction.
Economic activity can underpin regeneration without requiring the natural world to become another thing for us to trade.
The economic environment does not have to lose for the natural world to recover.
The opportunity is to recognise the value of increasing the capacity of the natural world while we still have the extraordinary economic capacity to do it.