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Obituary；Ray Anderson；
訃告；雷·安德森；
Ray Anderson, America's greenest businessman, died on August 8th, aged 77.
雷·安德森，美國最具環(huán)保意識的生意人，于8月8日逝世，享年77歲。
WHEN Ray Anderson first encountered the concept at an international conference, it took his breath away. It was so smart, so right. It was flexible, practical, beautiful, and made perfect sense. He knew right then that modular soft-surfaced floor coverings (carpet tiles, in other words), could change the world.
當雷·安德森在一次國際會議上首次意外碰到這個小方地毯的概念時，他激動不已。因為這個概念是如此的高明，如此的準確，而且靈活，實用，美觀，并且非常合情合理。那時他就知道這些組合式的表面柔軟的地毯（換句話說，小方地毯）能夠改變世界。
Others thought he was round the bend. When he decided to give up his job at Milliken Carpet in LaGrange, Georgia to set up a 15-person carpet company, and was clearing out his desk that February of 1973, two colleagues looked in. “We don't think you can do this,” they told him. He replied, in his languid, ever-courteous southern lilt, “The hell you say.” Fifteen years later his company, renamed Interface, was the biggest carpet-tile maker on the planet.
別人則認為他發(fā)瘋了。當他決定辭去佐治亞州拉格蘭奇市的米利肯地毯公司的工作去建立一個15位員工的地毯公司時，正是1973年2月的一天，當時他正在清理辦公桌，兩位同事進來幫了忙?！拔覀円詾槟悴粫@么做的，”他們告訴他?！澳銈冊陂_玩笑吧。”他回答道，語氣不僅悠閑自在，而且抑揚頓挫，卻一如既往地謙恭有禮。15年后，他的公司改名為界面股份有限公司（Interface Inc.），并成了這個世界上最大的小方地毯制造商。
This also made Mr Anderson a considerable plunderer of the earth. He never thought about that at first. To his mind he was no more a thief of Nature than when, a country boy during the Depression, he had hooked 20-pound channel catfish, now long gone, out of the Chattahoochee River. His business complied with government regulations. His product, too, was much less wasteful than broadloom carpet, since you could easily cut the tiles to run cables underneath, and replace them one by one as they wore out. They were, it was true, almost entirely made of petroleum in some form or another. Some pretty bad stuff was used in the dye and the glue. More than 200 smokestacks blackened the sky to produce them. But boardrooms laid with Interface carpet tiles looked and felt a million dollars.
這也使得安德森先生成為了一位重要的地球資源劫掠者。開始的時候，他從來沒有考慮過這點。在他看來，他已不再是一個自然界的小偷了。而當大蕭條期間，當時還是鄉(xiāng)村男孩的他還從從查特胡奇河（或意譯為多彩的巖石河）（Chattahoochee River）釣上了現(xiàn)在早已沒有了的20磅重的水渠鯰魚。他的生意遵循著政府的規(guī)章制度，公司的產(chǎn)品也遠不及闊幅地毯浪費那么多，因為人們很容易割斷這些小方地毯而在下面鋪上電纜，而且，當它們用壞了時，人們可以逐一替換它們。事實上，這些小方地毯幾乎完全以石油的這種或那種形式制造而成。一些非常有害的東西可用于染料和膠水。公司的200多個大煙囪冒著濃濃的黑煙在生產(chǎn)這些小地毯。但是，鋪上了界面股份有限公司（Interface Inc.）小方地毯董事會的會議室看上去讓人認為相當豪華。
The turning point, his “mid-course correction”, came in 1994. He was 60, but not yet ready to retire to the mountains or chase a little white ball. Under pressure from customers to produce some sort of environmental strategy for his company, he got a small task-force together. Someone gave him a book, Paul Hawken's “The Ecology of Commerce” to help him prepare his first speech on the subject. Thumbing vaguely through it, he chanced on a chapter called “The Death of Birth”, about the extinction of species. Reading on, he came to a passage about reindeer being wiped out on St Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. Suddenly, the tears were running down his face. A spear-point had jammed into his heart. It was the very same feeling, he said later, as when he had first seen carpet tiles, but orders of magnitude larger. He was to blame for making the world worse. Now he had to make it better.
1994年，他的“中期修正”方案成了公司的轉(zhuǎn)折點。那時他已60歲，但還沒有準備退休后歸隱山林或去打高爾夫球。在客戶的壓力下，為了替公司制定出某種環(huán)境策略，他組成了一個小型特別工作組。有人給了他一本保羅·霍肯的《商業(yè)生態(tài)》來幫助他準備關(guān)于這個主題的首次演講。由于大致地翻看著這本書，他偶然發(fā)現(xiàn)了關(guān)于物種滅亡而稱之為“出生的致死原因” 那一章。他就讀了下來，看到一段講述白令海圣馬修島上的馴鹿被殺戮殆盡了。突然間，淚水順著他的臉頰流了下來，此時，一個矛頭已經(jīng)刺進了他的內(nèi)心。他后來說道，這就是那種正如當他第一次看到小方地毯時同樣的感覺，但是這次的強度要大的多。他注定要因使世界變得更糟糕而受指責，所以現(xiàn)在，他必須讓世界變得好一點。
Interface, he decided, would leave no print on the green-and-blue carpet of the world. By 2020 it would take nothing from the earth that could not be rapidly replenished. It would produce no greenhouse-gas emissions and no waste. That meant using renewables rather than fossil fuel; endeavouring to make carpet tiles out of carbohydrate polymers rather than petroleum; and recycling old-carpet sludge into pellets that could be used as backing.
他決定，界面股份有限公司（Interface Inc.）將在這個世界的綠色和藍色地毯上不留下任何痕跡。截至2020年，公司將不再使用地球上不能快速再生的資源。到那時，公司的生產(chǎn)過程將不再產(chǎn)生溫室氣體排放，也不會有浪費。這意味著公司將利用可再生能源，而不是化石燃料；并將努力用碳水化合物而不是石油制造小方地毯；而且還將重新利用舊地毯的沉淀物生產(chǎn)能夠用于支持作用的小硬球。
Some of the technologies Mr Anderson hoped for (and half-envisaged, as a graduate in systems engineering from his much-loved Georgia Tech) had not been invented when he started. Several colleagues thought he had gone round the bend again. He had to bring them along slowly, in his quiet way, until they “got it” by themselves. But by 2007 the company was, he reckoned, about halfway up “Mount Sustainability”. Greenhouse-gas emissions by absolute tonnage were down 92% since 1995, water usage down 75%, and 74,000 tonnes of used carpet had been recovered from landfills. The $400m he was saving each year by making no scrap and no off-quality tiles more than paid for the R&D and the process changes. As much as 25% of the company's new material came from “post-consumer recycling”. And he was loaded with honours and awards as the greenest businessman in America.
當安德森先生剛起步的時候，他所希望的一些技術(shù)（作為他深深喜歡的佐治亞理工學(xué)院的一位系統(tǒng)工程研究生，他只是半想像這些技術(shù)）還沒有發(fā)明出來。幾位同事還以為他又發(fā)瘋了。他不得不以他安謐悠閑的方式慢慢地培養(yǎng)他們，直到他們自己真正理解了這項技術(shù)。但是，到2007年為止，他估計公司會走在進行可持續(xù)性發(fā)展的半道上。自1995年以來，公司以絕對噸位計算的溫室氣體排放量下降了92%，水量下降了75%，而且從垃圾填埋場重新回收了7萬4千噸舊地毯。他每年因不生產(chǎn)小方地毯的廢品和不合格產(chǎn)品而節(jié)省下來的4億多美元比研發(fā)和工藝變革方面的支出還要多。公司新材料高達25％來自“消費回收”。因而作為美國最環(huán)保的商人，他被授予了很多的榮譽和獎勵。
Most satisfying of all, sales had increased by two-thirds since his conversion, and profits had doubled. For Mr Anderson always kept his eye on the bottom line. He could be sentimental, ending his many public speeches with an apologetic poem to “Tomorrow's Child” written by an employee after one of his pep talks, but he was only half a dreamer. His company was his child, too. Profits mattered. This made some greens snipe at him, but it also made Walmart send two of its senior people round to his factory in LaGrange to see what he was doing right. As a success, he could powerfully influence others.
最令人滿意的是，自他轉(zhuǎn)變以來，公司銷售額增加了三分之二，而且利潤增加了一倍，因為安德森先生始終密切關(guān)注著帳本底線。他可以是感性的，經(jīng)常以一首對一位雇員所寫的《明天的孩子》的道歉詩而結(jié)束了他許多的演講。這位雇員是在他的一次激勵性講話后寫下了《明天的孩子》。但是他只是個半夢想家。他的公司也是他的孩子，不過，利潤很重要。這使得一些環(huán)保主義者們對他惡意中傷，但這也讓沃爾瑪派遣了幾位高層人員到拉格蘭奇的工廠，看看他到底做的是否合適。作為一位成功人士，他能夠強烈地影響別人。
The forest floor
森林地面
He never dreamed of giving up carpet tiles. Their beauty and variety delighted him, just as Nature's did. In his office in LaGrange they were laid out like abstract art on tables, while hanks of yarn hung on the walls. His company introduced Cool Carpet?, which had made no contribution to global warming all along the supply chain, and multicoloured FLOR for the home, “practical and pretty, too”. He was proudest, though, of Entropy?, a carpet-tile design inspired directly by the forest floor. No two tiles were alike: no two sticks, no two leaves. They could be laid and replaced quite randomly, even used in bits, eliminating waste. And when you lay down on them you might almost be in Mr Anderson's 86-acre piece of forest near Atlanta, listening to the sparrows in the long-leaf pines, rejoicing in being a non-harming part of the web of life, like him.
他從來沒有想到要放棄小方地毯。它們的美麗和多樣性一如自然界的美麗和多樣性，都能讓他開心不已。在他拉格蘭奇的辦公室里，這些小方地毯就像抽象藝術(shù)一樣攤開在桌子上，而多絞紗線則掛在墻上。他的公司推出了注冊酷地毯（Cool Carpet?）為商標的地毯和為家庭推出了“實用而且漂亮”的多色彩的弗洛爾（FLOR）地毯。生產(chǎn)這種酷地毯（Cool Carpet?）的一系列的供應(yīng)鏈上對全球氣候變暖都不會起作用。但是，他最值得驕傲的是注冊了熵（Entropy）為商標的小方地毯。這種小方地毯的設(shè)計直接受到森林地面的啟發(fā)。沒有兩片小方地毯是相似的，因為沒有兩根枯枝或兩片葉子是相似的。這些小方地毯可以相當隨機地鋪設(shè)和替換，即使用的很少，也杜絕浪費。當你躺在這些小方地毯上時，你或許就像在亞特蘭大附近安德森先生的86-英畝森林的一部分，就像他一樣傾聽著長葉松上的麻雀嘰嘰喳喳，為成為生物織物的無害部分而盡情高興。
