Turning Back the Resource Clock

On a stretch of peatland in Siak Regency, Riau, a business launched in 2020 is working to prove that communities can achieve prosperity by protecting the ecosystem. This micro, small, and medium-sized enterprise — PT Alam Siak Lestari — stands as an antithesis to the prevailing take-make-dispose economic model.

Modest in scale, Alam Siak Lestari illustrates the critique of growth-obsessed economic models. It has been positioned as a localized version of the widely celebrated 'green economy', a concept embraced for its focus on sustainability.

Given the high rates of deforestation, sustainability alone is not enough. — Rezal Kusumaatmadja, PT Rimba Makmur Utama

Globally, such critiques have resonated since the 1970s, notably through the Club of Rome's report The Limits to Growth (1972), which argued that endless economic expansion is not only impossible but has failed to deliver equitable prosperity while driving widespread environmental degradation.

This echoed John Maynard Keynes's prediction that once societies grew wealthy, 'the love of money as a possession will be recognized for what it is' — a 'somewhat disgusting morbidity'. Keynes was not referring to the environment; in the 1930s, that concern had yet to become an issue. It was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) that first sounded the alarm on a bleak environmental future, showing how DDT accumulated in the food chain and caused cancer and genetic damage.

Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. — Rachel Carson

In 1993, Paul Hawken published The Ecology of Commerce, becoming one of the first voices from the business world to candidly remind that 'business is destroying the world' in ways unmatched by any other force. He wrote that any viable transformation 'must turn back the resource clock and devote itself actively to restoring damaged and deteriorating systems. Restoration is far more compelling than the algebra of sustainability.'

Before Hawken introduced the restorative economy, the concept of a circular economy had already been sketched by David W. Pearce and R. Kerry Turner (1990) — a system that transforms waste from extraction, production, and consumption into inputs for further production. In this model, waste is a sign of system failure.

In 2017, Kate Raworth, economist at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, introduced 'doughnut economics' to complement the circular economy. In her book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, she places human well-being — rather than money — at the starting point. She envisions two circles sharing the same centre: an inner ring (a social foundation aligned with the SDGs) and an outer ring (an ecological ceiling drawn from planetary boundaries). The sketch, she remarked, 'looked like a doughnut.'

Between those two boundaries lies a safe and just space for humanity to develop and progress — a way of living, she notes, that 'many indigenous cultures have understood for thousands of years.'