Delivering a keynote address here Monday at the 5th Global Competitiveness Forum, Paul Hawken said understanding how energy consumption is interconnected with the degradation of many other parts of earth is an imperative that people need to more fully understand and take into account in their actions, innovations and policies.

Hawken's career has included starting ecological businesses, writing about the impact of commerce on living systems, and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology and environmental policy.

In his address, he referred to what he called the “Red Queen Dilemma” to drive home his point — a reference to Lewis Carroll's “Alice in Wonderland,” where a Red Queen has to travel twice as fast in order to stay stationary, and even faster to make progress.

Hawken believes the world today is using more and more energy to produce the same quantity of output — “reversing the trend of productivity since the Industrial Revolution.”

According to him, it is imperative that people recognize that they live on an “island,” and that continuing to harvest resources in this manner is unsustainable. “We must understand our actions to be part of a complete system in a world where everything interacts with each other,” he said.

Hawken did not propose a specific solution. Instead he declared that a more intimate understanding of this dilemma is an essential part of consuming and innovating appropriately for a sustainable world. “We must think of our globe as an interconnected system,” he said. “This must permeate how we act socially, politically, economically, etc. Today we are using more and more energy to get less and less energy.”

He observed: “One of the largest new oil reserves in the world has taken decades to find, and will only last the world 15 months.”

Hawken asked his audience: “What would we have to do to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent in the next 25 years — the figure that we are being told is necessary? We would have to create 1,000 square meters of solar panels per second for the next 25 years, or 100 megawatt geothermal power plants every day for the next 25 years.”

He warned that the “Red Queen’s Dilemma” was forcing productivity to decline and effectively "reversing the Industrial Revolution.

The guiding principle for economics, politics and every other arena of life should be awareness of the effects of our actions on all parts of the system. "Then we can innovate a solution that can confront this problem," he said.