Elusive Sustainability

If sustainability is to be our focus, it seems we have some issues to resolve on exactly what it is we are focusing on.  In my efforts to better understand the concept, I came across an interesting article that gets at some of the challenges associated with trying to figure out what sustainability really means, and once we agree on a meaning, how we go about achieving it.

The article is titled FRAMING THE ELUSIVE CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABILITY: A SUSTAINABLE HIERARCHY  and was written by Julian D. Marshall and Michael W. Toffel in Volume 39, Number 3 of ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY. 

The authors begin their paper with an introduction that explores some of the history of the use of the term sustainability as related to the environment.  They point out that:

By the mid-1990s, there were well over 100 definitions of sustainability. This definitional chaos has nearly rendered the term sustainability meaningless and is distracting from the need to address ongoing environmental degradation. 

They provide a brief overview of four sustainability frameworks that include:

The Triple Bottom Line.  Advocates of “the triple bottom line” believe that organizations pursuing sustainability ought to make decisions based not only on economic returns but also on environmental protection and social justice.

The Natural Step. The Natural Step defines a sustainable society as one where four conditions are met: “nature is not subject to systematically increasing (1) concentrations of substances extracted from the earth’s crust, (2) concentrations of substances produced by society, or (3) degradation by physical means; and, in that society, (4) human needs are met worldwide”.

The Ecological Footprint. The Ecological Footprint compares the environmental impact of specific actions to the limitations of the earth’s natural resources and ecosystem functionality.

Graedel and Klee’s Sustainable Emissions and Resource Usage. Graedel and Klee propose a four-step process for determining a sustainable rate of resource use: (i) calculate the available supply of virgin materials (mass); (ii) allocate consumption of this supply over a specific time scale and among the global population (mass per person per year); (iii) account for recycling and for existing stockpiles including landfills and then update the allocated consumption rate; and (iv) consider this rate to be the maximum sustainable consumption rate and compare it to the current usage rate.

The authors then propose the use of a Sustainability Hierarchy, much like Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” that lays out ways of categorizing actions into four levels to determine whether or not they are sustainable. 

Level 1: Actions that, if continued at the current or forecasted rate, endanger the survival of humans.

Level 2: Actions that significantly reduce life expectancy or other basic health indicators.

Level 3: Actions that may cause species extinction or that violate human rights.

Level 4: Actions that reduce quality of life or are inconsistent with other values, beliefs, or aesthetic preferences.

The four levels make it clear “that an action can be considered sustainable on one level, while unsustainable at another” and that there is a need to specify which level is being considered when an action is labeled as “sustainable” or “unsustainable”. 

The importance of considering the ecosystem when it comes to sustainability decision making is highlighted where the authors point out that ”ecosystem function refers to the goods and services provided by the natural environment that are required to support human life, human health, and species viability. Changes in ecosystem function can indicate changes in the health of the ecosystem.”  They also speak about the importance of including consumption in the sustainability equation when they remind us that: “Consuming resources beyond regenerative rates can impede ecosystem function and eventually lead to ecosystem collapse.”  

And they also include what I believe is the key measure of sustainability – “Actions that impair ecosystem function too much are unsustainable, while those that maintain ecosystem function are sustainable.”  This line reminds me of Aldo Leopold’s classic land ethic summary “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise” 

The authors conclude that

“sustainability means transforming our ways of living to maximize the chances that environmental and social conditions will indefinitely support human security, wellbeing, and health”. Indeed, this offers a useful working definition for “sustainability”. While improving the health, security, and quality of life for humans is an ethical imperative, the morally desirable level of improvement extends beyond that which is required for human survival, health, or human rights. As such, to preserve meaning in the term sustainability, people must be explicit about the hierarchy level to which they are referring and be cognizant of the term’s spatial and temporal dimensions. As discussed above, we discourage those addressing level 4 issues from labeling their work - worthy as it is - as sustainability. We also discourage the use of sustainability as a synonym for “good” or for “having a reduced environmental impact”.

Although I understand why the authors recommend leaving level 4 issues out of the sustainability category, namely because of the difficulty that dealing with issues from this highest level bring with them, failure to reach for this higher level will not in the end result in any kind of long-term sustainable society.  It is the higher level actions that are what make us human - that ultimately sustain us.  And that is why we need to delve into what sustainability means to us and our work.  

 So remember:

There is an acute need for scientists and engineers to incorporate sustainability concerns in their work, such as by exploring the full social and environmental impacts of technologies and technical systems. While tools such as pollution prevention and industrial ecology are useful, “alone [they] are not sufficient to achieve sustainability, because even systems with efficient material and energy use can overwhelm the carrying capacity of a region or lead to other socially unacceptable outcomes”.

And let us not become overwhelmed ourselves. 

SPIRITED LEADERSHIP PART 3

Click here for Part 1.

Click here for Part 2. 

Wisdom from elders, elders of the Hopi nation in particular, was the next topic of Margaret Wheatley’s talk.  She shared the following Hopi prophecy:   

Here is a river flowing now very fast.  It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid, who will try to hold on to the shore.   They are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.  Know that the river has its destination.  The elders say we must let go of the shore.  Push off into the middle of the river, and keep our heads above water.   

And I say see who is in there with you and celebrate.  At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves, for the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.  The time for the lone wolf is over.  Gather yourselves.  Banish the word struggle from you attitude and vocabulary. 

All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.  For we are the ones we've been waiting for.

Wheatley’s discussed her book PERSERVERANCE where she used the Hopi wisdom above as a way to inspire readers to persevere.  She highlighted that our reason for letting go of the shore is not to save ourselves, but to be available as the middle of the river is a place of service – it is the place where people will be looking for guidance on how to survive out of reach of the shore and follow the rivers destination.  We need to banish the word struggle from our vocabulary and we are the ones we have been waiting for.    

We need to be aware of our habitual responses to ambiguity and uncertainty and through this awareness we can respond in more meaningful ways.  We need to realize we cling to the shore and be willing to let go to reach the place where we can be effective.  And we need to develop and name strategies that we can use to help us stay in the middle of the river.

These strategies will include: finding ways to enjoy uncertainty instead of fighting it; finding the experiences of boredom as a reminder to let go of the shore – of the known;  paying attention to the need to be responsible to, react to, and enjoy the company of others; and asking for help and guidance from these others.  And we need to ask ourselves – how often do we take time to reflect?  Awareness gained by reflection is a key to keeping our head above water while we journey in  the middle of the river.  

The problems we face will require thinking skills that we don’t yet have.  Poverty, education, healthcare are but a few of the areas where the problems we face are escalating.  And the institutions that are in place to deal with this issues are dysfunctional.  So who will we choose to be, and how will we sustain our energy?  The tough issues we care about will need us to address these questions if we are to be around for the long term that will be needed to address them. 

This is a tough call in these times when self-care and self-sustenance are mis-perceived as selfish.  It is often easier to get caught up in becoming the absurd hero – like the mythological character Sisyphus who was condemned by the gods to spend eternity rolling a bolder up a mountain, only to have it roll back down when he got to the top.  (For more on the topic see the blog post here.)  His eternity of hard work resulted in nothing being accomplished.   

The sense of urgency we feel to deal with the issues we are concerned about create failure in our relationships.   Motivations from anger or outrage fail to give us to capacity to persevere.   The more urgent the issue, the more time we need to take to nurture relationships.  And our increasing passions interfere with building and maintaining those relationships.  The desperation that fills the voids results in us trying to work harder, and we become judgmental.  As the issues take us over, we become ineffective. 

Do we choose free will and find ways to nurture ourselves and our relationships or do we accept the condemnation to keep pushing the boulder up the mountain?  It is times like this where we need to choose to use our minds and take time to reflect and think like a human being, rather than spending our time spinning mindlessly on the gerbil wheel.  We also need to spend time reflecting with our colleagues on what we just did.  It is this communal reflection that will be necessary in these times where it is rarely practiced. 

Wheatley moved into the final part of her talk with a discussion of the stress that dominates our world today.   When we become stressed, we lose the ability to think and we can not connect the dots.  We have no sense for the context of where we find ourselves.  We no longer possess human brains.  We find that our memory loss is equivalent to being distracted.  We are simply so distracted that we cannot remember anything. 

The sinking of the Titanic is an example of how distraction can sink our ships.  Three days prior to the sinking of the Titanic, reports had been issued about icebergs that would be encountered.  The captain responded with a minor course correction followed by the order of full steam ahead.  Forty minutes prior to the sinking, another shipped radioed the Titanic trying to warn them about the impending icebergs in the area.  The Titanic radio operator responded to this warning – “shut up, shut up, I am busy”.   We all push things away because we are busy, and we can suffer drastic consequences.  The simple solution is to pay attention – and to create conditions that allow us to pay attention, and then to act accordingly.  We need to take time to think – personally and collectively. 

Too often we focus on the task and forget about the process, the socialization, the community.   An example of an organization that understands the importance of process is The GreenBelt Movement  founded by Wangari Maathai.  It is an organization that was instrumental in inspiring the women of Kenya to plant over 40 million trees as a way to protect their water supplies and provide wood for fuel and materials.  They did this by including a celebration as kickoff of the tree planting work.   It is through celebration that we come to know peace.

And it is an inner peace that can only come through personal practice that will help us to build community.  These practices are many and varied and can include prayer, meditation, walking, spending time with a pet, making music or art, or participating in joyful accomplishment.  Whatever the practices, they will need to be increased in order to raise the peace in this increasingly un-peaceful world.  Start with finding a daily practice, practice it ten minutes a day, be disciplined in your practice, and practice it – or be eaten alive!  

It is up to us.  Find a name for what you want to be, and be fearless.  Stretch toward service – not profit.  With fear and aggression on the rise – take a stand for good human life.  Vow not to increase fear and aggression in the world.  Adopt values counter to our current culture.  Strengthen yourself through practices that increase inner peace.  Do this so you can stay in the middle of the river.  It is our time to serve the world.  Wake up before you die and remember that when you were born – you rejoiced!

SPIRITED LEADERSHIP PART 2

Click here for Part 1. 

Margaret Wheatley continued her talk by reminding us that new cultures are formed by a few people not afraid to be insecure.  These reformers proceed down what they know is the right path until they are apprehended.  They do this because they know that in a disaster situation there is no risk.  When you are already in the middle of a disaster, don’t be afraid to try new ways.  And practice perseverance – the ability to work with what we have and not to wait for something we don’t have.  

The skills that we will be needed to stay the course include the ability to: remain vulnerable and open; accept insecurity and risk; float free; and accept ambiguity.   And with that she led the large group into a discussion.  She outlined a procedure promoted by THE WORLD CAFÉ organization which developed a format that can be used to host large group dialogue.  She instructed the attendees to break into groups of 3 to 5 people to share their thoughts on what they had heard so far that got their attention.  

She reminded us to have group and individual responsibility, to choose people to join with who did not look like we did, to be present to the differences in what we heard, and to be aware of when our attention wandered from listening to the person who was sharing.   She also requested that at the end of the discussion that when we saw her raising her hand that we would all raise our own hand and stop talking.  At the end of the 20 minutes of discussion, Wheatley raised her hand and within seconds the hundreds of people engaged in conversation stopped and returned their attention to the stage.  It was an amazing demonstration of a large group of people being responsible.    

Wheatley then moved into more ideas that would help leaders to weather the storm.  These included the need to perverse, in the sense of turning away from the dysfunctional standards that currently drive our culture.  We need to stand for the counter-culture and play the role of the warrior.  Being a warrior is one answer to the question she started her talk off with, “Who do you choose to be for this time?”  It is not a warrior in the sense of using violence to kill our enemy that she was talking about, but rather a spiritual warrior – someone inspired to do the right thing, despite the consequences.   

One of the keys to finding courage in what some are calling end times is to be able to appreciate and use the fine art of satire or dark humor.  She gave an example of one bumper sticker that has come out that says “When the rapture comes, this car will be empty”.  A good dark humor responsive bumper sticker she saw read “When the rapture comes, can I have your car?”  We need to take nothing too seriously, least of all ourselves.  We need to make fun of things, especially the behaviors and actions that deserve to be made fun of.  And when behaviors are ridiculous, they need to be named as such.   

Continued inPart 3.

Ordinary Men and Women

We are but ordinary men and women.  And because we are ordinary men and women, then we are non-conformist rebels - dreamers.  Yes, yes we can say that that overweight woman in Walmart - buying all her shit there - that is a dreamer-rebel?  Yes.  (...).  The rebellion can be be dormant, latent, but it is there and it is ordinary men and women that can produce the change in the world.

Gustavo Esteva, from a talk given at the Economics of Happiness Conference in Berkeley California, March 2012. 

Click here to see the talk. 

SPIRITED LEADERSHIP PART 1

A few weeks ago I spent a Friday afternoon with Margaret Wheatley   and about four hundred other folks who came to hear her talk about SPIRITED LEADERSHIP IN CRITICAL TIMES . The talk cosponsored by Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality and the Loyola Center for Spirituality was held at St. Catherine University in St. Paul Minnesota.  Her talk was balanced by the music and songs of singer/songwriter Barbara McAfee. 

 

Wheatley is one of my favorite authors on the topic of leadership.  At the end of her three hour discussion I came away feeling energized to go out into our troubled world and find ways to make it better place.  What follows are some of the highlights that I took away from the afternoon of her sharing of what she believes leaders will need in order to thrive in these troubled times.  

She opened the afternoon by asking the attendees, “Who do you choose to be for this time?”  To be an effective leader requires that we know who we are and what is important to us.  We need to know what it is we long for.  Evaluating these important issues is what will ground us.  And she reminded us that struggling with the difficult issues of our day “it’s no big deal, it’s just our turn”.  According to Thomas Merton, “Humans have a responsibility to their own time.”  And indeed if we don’t step up to deal with the issues of our day, who will?    

And with that she launched into what she described as “the depressing journey of our time”.  In these dark times we cannot change the world as it is, but we can open ourselves up to it and find gentleness, decency, and bravery that is available to all of us.  Many of us are experiencing the feelings of being overwhelmed and exhausted.   

She shared an excerpt from a recent email she had received that explained how the sender felt like she was crossing a raging river by hopping from rock to rock, but the rocks seemed to be disappear below the surface of the water before she could reach them and she worried that her next step might l cast her into the current out of site of the distant shore.   

We are told that “we need to do more with less” and we face increasing conflicts, fear and anxiety, and more polarization.   And those who attempt to lead us prey on our fear and anxiety and try to terrify us of their opponents.  Instead of trying to understand the complexity of the problems we create, we look for someone else to blame.  And because of our failure to think critically about the issues, we simply blunder our way from one crisis to another, blaming the other, and allowing our burgeoning bureaucracy to keep us tied to our meaningless work.    

And in this constant crisis mode we try to find quick fixes to our problems.  One example she shared was the old slogan that is still relevant to today, “Drink Coffee.  Do Stupid Things Faster with More Energy”. 

And it is these futile attempts that bring about the feelings we have that were portrayed in the cartoon she showed  with the title “THE HISTORY OF MAN” - followed by a frame with a man asking the question “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?” -  followed by “THE END”.  Our busyness and dysfunction block our ability to answer the question and learn from the answer before it is too late.   

    

And so in these trouble times where there are no large institutions that are working well, where bad values dominate, and where we have desperate men blaming women (a reference Wheatley was making to the recent news of the Catholic Church clamping down on nuns in the United States), where do we turn?  

Continued in Part 2 here.

Lessons From The Garden

An experiment into animating pictures.  Some insights from a recent visit to the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary on sustainable living. 

COSMIC HOME

I came across a great used book for $1 at a book sale a few months ago.  The book is called AT HOME IN THE COSMOS,  by David Toolan and was published in 2001.  Toolan died from cancer, shortly after the book was published.  The book was well worth the investment.

Toolan separated the book into five parts:  The Biblical Version of Creation, The Development of Scientific Materialism, The State of the Earth, The New Cosmology, and Earth Ethics.  Throughout the book he explains how the state of the planet and how we treat it is related to the blended misunderstandings we have learned from science and religion.  In “The State of the Earth”, he summarizes the four principle driving forces behind the environmental damage that is occurring to the planet as follows:

1.    Population size and growth:  [...].  If environmental degradation is already apparent with today’s 6 billion people (note that we have added another billion people since the book was written in 2001), how will we accommodate the 11 to 14 billion expected in the next century without devastating the resource base of the planet?

    2.    Institutional arrangements:  In industrial economies, [...], the central dynamic is the pursuit of continuous economic expansion.  Competition makes higher profitability a key to corporate survival, and firms must constantly grow to attract investors and increase profits.  And the chief function of governments is to provide the political environment for such continuous growth.  Both orthodox economic theory and socioeconomic policy at the national and international levels assume that unlimited economic expansion is desirable, possible, and necessary.  Yet this ideology of growth depletes the stock of nonrenewable resources and often taxes the stock of renewable resources (fish, aquifers, forests) at a rate that far exceeds its replacement rate.  

3.    Cultural values and belief systems:  [...].  Western society has tended to view the physical world as inert, a meaningless scurrying of atoms whose  only value consists of the values human beings ‘add’ or impose through industrial processes.  By itself, in other words, nature is simply ‘raw material,’ of no value until human labor transforms it into commodities useful to human society.  Hence nature has no intrinsic value, only instrumental value.  This is the last word in anthropocentrism – and issues an open invitation for exploitation and abuse.  Materialism exacerbates the problem.  Consumerism, the incarnation of materialistic values, has elevated buying and shopping to a sacred ritual and civic duty in our society – precisely insofar as it maintains demand for ever-more goods and services, needed or not.

   

 4.    Technology enabling the human transformation of the environment:  In market economies, technology has assumed a major role in improving productivity, mainly by removing human labor.  Energy technology underlies all economic activity and growth, and more productive technology has offered new ways to exploit natural resources, hastening resource depletion and increasing pollutant emissions.  Our faith in and use of technology has been a Faustian bargain, trading current gain against long-term welfare and survival.

In the concluding part – “Earth Ethics” – he points out that if we want to change the trajectory of where we are taking our planet, we need to change our ethics.  We need to expand “our moral concern beyond the human circle to include the larger biological and ecological communities to which we belong.” 

  

Toolan answers the question, “Why behave this way rather than that?” as follows:

So that the earth can continue, so the air will remain breathable, so the seas will abound in fish and the rainforests flourish with millions of species as yet unnamed, so that the land will continue to be fertile, so time will continue to flow and life will keep on propagating.  So the causes of things will continue to give rise to their results.  These things are now our tasks, our moral duties.  We can no longer pretend that we do not know why or how all these wonders happen, or why they cease to happen.  The difference we can make in the creative, generative process – or the cessation of the process – is crucial.  From now on, the categorical imperative will reside in objective scientific laws, which it will be our duty to honor, promote, and keep.  This is the new social contract with the natural world, which will continue to thrive only with our active cooperation and support.  As Serres put it, “We have become the authors of ongoing creation.” 

The challenge seems to be how to instill this ethic of respect into our lives that have been misguided for so long by economics.  But on the other hand, how can we not?