Apply Now for Master's Programs in Sustainability & A Brief History of My Recent Life

Applications are open (through Jan. 15) for two amazing sustainability master’s programs in Sweden – MSLS and MSPI (details below). Please share with anyone you think might be interested in a transformative international experience.  Here’s a quick run down of mine:

The genesis of this blog was one of these programs that I attended eight years ago.  (It was those ancient days before Facebook and Gmail were really things, and I was emailing friends & family about this amazing experience, when I realized: this is why they invented blogs).

The experience changed my life. 

It tied together all of the things I’d been trying to do for years to assemble a career in the sustainability field. It gave me a great framework and opened my eyes to whole new worlds, new ways of thinking, amazingly exciting areas of theory and research.

I met my wife. 

It tapped me into an incredibly dynamic, engaged, welcoming, and exciting international network of sustainability leaders. I met ‘gurus’ whose books I had loved and who I never figured I meet. They became thesis advisors, mentors, and friends.

We got a puppy. 

It led directly to exciting jobs and projects with huge sustainability impact, and endless opportunities for learning and growth. We got to present at conferences, meet incredible leaders. 

We had a baby.

The program left me with lifelong friends, and every since I’ve been able to look up fellow alumni in just about every part of the world, get introductions, crash in guestrooms, and make more lifelong friends.

We have a shared language and a shared understanding about the big challenges society faces, and the unbelievably exciting solutions that have the potential to improve quality of life for everyone, now and in the future.

Please check out the details below if you’re at all interested, and share with anyone else you think might be – maybe some recent college grads, or a friend thinking about a career change, or someone looking to incorporate some bigger-picture meaning into their current role, or someone already working in a sustainability-related field, who might want to recharge and get re-inspired...

--

Sustainability Master’s Programmes at the Blekinge Institute of Technology

The Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) is a top ranked sustainability research and education institution currently recruiting talented, early to mid career professionals for its cutting-edge Masters programs. BTH is located in the beautiful coastal city of Karlskrona, a UNESCO world heritage site on the southeast coast of Sweden.

There are two MSc programs available, both suited for early- to mid-career professionals from around the world (the 450 alumni have come from 69 different countries), and taught in English.

The Master's in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (MSLS) program is a one-year program founded on the basic premise that a "whole-system," trans-disciplinary approach is needed to deal with the sustainability challenge.  Two integrated streams are the focus: 1) a framework for strategic sustainable development; and 2) organizational learning and leadership required for sustainability decision-making. http://www.bth.se/msls

The Master’s in Sustainable Product/Service System Innovation (MSPI) program is two-year program designed for students wishing to combine engineering competence with sustainability knowledge to help deliver new product and service systems.  Specifically, students learn to analyze sustainability challenges for an organization in a scientific manner; introduce a strategic perspective on sustainability to a company’s product innovation process; use new methods and tools to work with sustainable product and service innovation in industry; and support a transition towards a more service-oriented economy.  More info can be found at: http://www.bth.se/mspi

Both programs are delivered in a non-traditional educational setting through experiential and holistic learning methods.  Tuition is 100,000 SEK (about US$15,000), and is paid by the Swedish government for EU and EEA citizens.

Applications are due January 15th, 2014.

-----

"The question of reaching sustainability is not about if we will have enough energy, enough food, or other tangible resources - those we have. The question is: will there be enough leaders in time?"

-- Dr. Karl-Henrik Robčrt and Dr. Göran Broman program co-founders.

Stay going.

--

Fast Times in Higher Ed

In the fast-paced business world, Fast Company has been keeping up with the winning trends at the leading edge. That's why it's very exciting that more and more they're seeing sustainability as a core strategic priority for any organization.

They've developed their own take on the concept, which they call Ethonomics and describe as follows:

"The end of the modern financial system as we know it has cleared the way for an era of ethical economics, or "Ethonomics"... Ethonomics is a hybrid of technology, design, and social responsibility, and at Fast Company we believe it is the future of business.

But we're not breathless cheerleaders for every daisy-splashed widget that comes down the pike. We have a skeptical eye out for greenwashing by large and small companies alike, and are impatient with lofty claims that stray too far from the marketplace or from Main Street."

What's even more exciting is that Fast Company sees the importance of higher education's role in developing and fostering this concept of Ethonomics, and driving the innovation, creativity, and prosperity-generation that comes with it. They've asked Tony Cortese and I to develop a 4-part blog series on the topic based on our work at Second Nature and with the ACUPCC.

In part one, we start with an overview of the education for sustainability movement and the basics of why this is the most important, core, strategic imperative for higher education and its students in the 21st century:

At colleges and universities, tomorrow's business leaders, architects, product designers, policy-makers, schoolteachers, economists, etc. learn about how the world works and how things get done. To date, they've learned how to do this in an unsustainable way. But a change is coming, with hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities transforming the way they teach and the choices they pursue in research and operations. Simply put, they are preparing students for 21st century citizenship.

To create a sustainable society, we need to be rethinking how we design just about everything - our products, our industrial systems, transportation systems, buildings, energy systems, agricultural systems, etc. - and we need to be doing so quickly. This is happening in many real ways in business and civil society, but the education sector is too often overlooked.

This is important in the medium-to-long-term as tomorrow graduates will soon be in the work force making decisions, and need a comprehensive understanding of sustainability - at the very least the basics of ecology, how social systems work, how complex systems operate, and what mechanisms undermine ecological and social systems.

But it's also important in the immediate-term. Colleges and universities operate as small cities, and can serve as great role-models for solutions. They have the social mandate to create the knowledge and graduates needed for a civil society and are set up to experiment with new and better ways of designing all of our systems.

Hundres of colleges and universities are taking this on in a real way with commitment from the top and incredible solutions emerging from all levels of the organizations - take a few minutes to check out a few of the 200+ climate action plans that have been submitted to the ACUPCC Reporting System to date.

Stay going.

A New Sound - the green collar economy

Cool new video from Green for All:



Stay going.

Earth Overshoot Day

Sadly, today is Earth Overshoot Day. This is based on the measure of the Global Footprint Network, that today humanity has consumed all of the new resources that nature will produce this year. From here until the end of the year, we'll no longer be "living off the interest" and instead will be "eating into our capital." A basic understanding of finances let's us know that this is not good for us - and especially not good for our children and grandchildren, who will be left with that much less, a world that produces less, and as a result a system that is far less resilient.

Often people make the mistake of thinking that sustainability is all about limits, having less stuff, being restricted in terms of what we can do. In fact, it is the opposite. By recklessly pursuing physical growth in a "take-make-waste" economy - thinking we're getting more - we're actually getting less - now and in the future.

As the Footprint Network points out, the financial collapse happening around us right now is a stark reminder of what can happen when debt and spending are allowed to grow out of control, with no responsibility and no acknowledgment of the natural limits that every system is subject to - whether it's the laws of thermodynamics on the planetary scale, or the rules of accounting for a business. You can only cheat the system for so long, and we've been cheating the system for too long. We continue to see examples of organizations, communities, cities, and now entire economies hitting the funnel walls - Enron, New Orleans, Houston/Galveston, Lehman/Bear/Freddie/Fannie/AIG.

Of course the good news is, that to avoid this collapse, all we need to do is be respectful of those limits. And these limits will not limit us. Constraints breed creativity - the rules of music enable artists to create beautiful songs as opposed to jumbles of noise, the rules of soccer make a fun game as opposed to an aimless group of people chasing a ball, tough engineering challenges with unusual constraints spur innovation, the list goes on. And accepting the challenge of operating all of our institutions, organizations, businesses and within the constraints of the sustainability principles will help us come together and engage in the most gratifying work imaginable - creating better lives for ourselves, our families, our communities, those around the world while contributing to the health and well-being of all other life. So we can move-on from this myth that acknowledging the reality of the limits that the laws of nature represent will cause problems for us - it only opens up opportunities and is our way forward for improving our quality of life.

To learn more about ecological footprinting, the Footprint Network, and Overshoot Day, check out: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/

Stay going...

You say tomato, I say Economicology

I’m on my way home from the 2008 ACUPCC Climate Leadership Summit in Grand Rapids, MI. It was a great success with about 150-200 people in attendance – mostly college and university presidents or their senior-level representatives, plus some sponsors, staff and colleagues. Ray Anderson was the keynote – his speech was great, as usual. The video of him talking is available here: . We also heard a good talk from Mayor Cownie, of Des Moines, who has been a driving force behind the Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, and called on mayors and ACUPCC presidents to work together to meet their respective climate commitments – something I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about.

The event was generously hosted by the Wege Foundation, started by Peter Wege, who used to run the family business – Steelcase, Inc. – a big office furniture company based in Grand Rapids. I got a copy of Wege’s book, Economicology: The Eleventh Commandment, which I just read on the trip home (clearly, it’s a quick read). The book runs through highlights and quotes from Wege’s favorite thinkers, and in the process draws out his concept of Economicology. In many ways, it’s essentially another way of saying ‘sustainability’ – with the focus, as the word suggests, on the potential for a mutually beneficial marriage of economics and ecology, instead of the common view that the benefit of the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. That is the trade-off mentality that is so deeply ingrained into our thinking – in many ways from birth and through the media – but in particular in economic classes in higher ed.

The book pulls from many great sources – some of which I was familiar with, some I wasn’t – and hits all the big topics – consumption, over-population, non-renewable resources, GDP vs. well-being, quantum physics, systems thinking, etc. A main tenant of Economicology is the 6 “E’s” – Economics, Environment, Ecology, Ethics, Empathy, and Education – all of which are inseparable and vitally important. Again, this is less a departure from sustainability as it is looking at it from a different angle in a different light. While in some ways it doesn’t have the cohesion or rigor of some other frameworks or approaches, that’s not really its intent – the intent is to bring those concepts to everyone (particularly those in business) in plain language, and in that I think it does a brilliant job.

Given that the Summit, and much of our work of late, focused on higher education, it is particularly heartening to see that element come through in the book. Two of the big themes in sustainability with regard to higher ed, are 1) the need for structural shifts to allow for more collaboration and work across the disciplines and 2) the need for an explicit articulation of sustainability – creating a healthy, just, thriving, sustainable society – as the goal for higher education. Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, and chair of the ACUPCC, addressed the second point brilliantly in his closing remarks at the summit, saying something to the affect that we can’t just keep trying to do good science with ever-greater specialization, and hope that the outcomes are useful or commercially viable.

The mandate of the higher ed sector is to fulfill education, research, and public service missions to create a thriving civil society. What is a thriving civil society other than one in which we meet our needs today without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. We so often lose sight of the most fundamental aspect of our activities – to what end they serve. The Sustainability Principles provide that definition of success on the principle level, and in combination with an understanding of basic Human Needs, enable us to make decisions and design cities, buildings, processes, goods, and services in ways that meet needs today and tomorrow.

Wege quotes H.G. Wells, writing on the heels of the Depression in 1939, who said with regard to the importance of an expanded world vision for the future: “and since the existing educational organizations of the world do not provide anything like that vision, nor establish the necessary conceptions of right conduct that arise from it, it (the world vision) needs to be rebuilt even more than the political framework needs to be rebuilt.”

Later, Wege notes that “We have to pull together the world’s intelligence to solve the tremendous challenges we face. Technology alone cannot solve them. Religion in itself cannot, nor can government. Our best hopes are to work through the world’s universities to link industry and technology in a union I’ve called Economicology.”

Call it what you like, it’s great stuff, and the kind of thinking we need more of – particularly from people of influence. It’s tremendously reassuring to come across another great leader in this regard. Stay going.

BPA, SP2, BoP, Funnel Walls, T&B,

BPA:

Last week the LA Times ran the following story about a report by the National Toxicology Program (part of the National Institutes of Health), which says there is concern about the affects of Bisphenol A (BPA) – a common synthetic chemical used in polycarbonate plastic – on human health (and therefore other forms of life).

A controversial, estrogen-like chemical in plastic could be harming the development of children's brains and reproductive organs, a federal health agency concluded in a report released Tuesday.

The full story is here:

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/medicine/la-na-plastic16apr16,1,498138.story

SP2:

From a sustainability perspective this comes as no surprise. Sustainability Principle 2 states that in a sustainable society nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of substances produced by society (such as synthetic chemicals). With all the plastics, including the additives, plasticizers, by-products, etc., that are persistent and foreign to natural systems, there is no doubt that our production, use, and disposal of them results in their systematic increase in nature. Living systems and organisms (including us) haven’t co-evolved with these compounds, and they are toxic. Shouldn’t really come as a surprise.

BoP:

This brings us to a core concept in creating a sustainable society – where falls the burden of proof. Right now it falls on the citizens, and our representative groups to respond to potential threats, and to prove that they are indeed threats, and battle through layers of bureaucracy, inertia, and special interests to secure the elimination (or partial elimination) of those threats. The burden of proof should, of course, fall on any of us that produce and sell a product, to ensure that to the best of our knowledge and that of the scientific community it is safe, and if greater knowledge reveals that it is not safe, we should no longer be able to produce and sell it.

Funnel Walls:

From an organizational perspective, companies that rely on BPA might be surprised, and will now have to react. Nalgene is trying to tactfully back away, saying they’ll stop using BPA in their water bottles because they think their customers will want that, even though they maintain it’s safe – so as to dampen the impact with the funnel walls, which could come in the form of litigation or loss of customers. Wal-mart has said it will adjust and stop selling baby bottles with BPA. It’s good their being responsive to the information, but the reactive approach is more expensive.

The Trunk & Branches:

By sticking to the “trunk and branches” of sustainability – the 4 sustainability principles – organizations can strategically move out of this reactive mode (or at least have the best chance possible of doing so). Instead of only trying to keep up with every study and judge which is serious, and what we can get away with, we can all (in our various roles in our various organizations) identify and champion creative ways to systematically eliminate our violations of sustainability principles.

Stay going…

Green washing... the future is later

My mom informed me over the Thanksgiving holiday that she learned a new term on NPR - greenwashing. It was in a piece about Auden Schendler - the sustainability director for Aspen Ski Co, who has been shaking things up saying that going green necessarily costs more - in businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_44/b4056001.htm?chan=search

(The article isn't really the point of this post, but I'll include some comments I emailed to a friend who asked if it was true or not - is going green really more expensive??)

This post is about this hilarious piece from freeloveforum - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71kckb8hhOQ - "the future is later..." Clearly people are becoming more aware of the threats of greenwashing, and understanding the complexities of it (and the sometimes obvious, pandering tones that greenwashing ads can use in attempts to connect with you). At the same time, there are a lot of shades of gray in this, and as Hunter Lovins says, often "hypocrisy is the first step to genuine change," so as part of companies' and society's movement towards sustainability, we're going to have some gray areas - the encouraging thing is that it is becoming front and center and we all have the opportunity to wrestle with and move through these gray areas in our own lives, while at the same time demanding that companies and governments do the same and support us in these efforts.

(On a related note, a blog I recently discovered, SenseUp, has a piece on another take on greenwahsing: soap. Clever...)

Response to BizWeek article on Aspen:

"Schendler explains his confessional mood as the result of cumulative frustration: with foot-dragging colleagues, with himself for compromising, and with the entire green movement frothily sweeping through corporations in America and Europe."

I would say that he has just had challenges applying what he learned at the Rocky Mountain Institute. If applied in a conventional way, many green initiatives can represent additional costs. What we (and RMI) stress is the importance of a whole-system approach. The easiest examples are in buildings. If you had an energy efficiency technology, or solar panel, just tacked on to your average building, you can easily calculate the pay-back period, and depending on energy prices, etc, it either will or will not be attractive given the length of the payback time (even if it’s longer than standard pay-backs some companies do it for PR reasons). But if you design a building to be oriented towards the sun in such a way, insulated in such a way, using natural lighting, the most innovative and efficient fixtures, etc all right up front, you can dramatically reduce energy demand, and dramatically increase the payback and effectiveness of something like solar panels, so they do make sense, and aren’t just a sexy, expensive add-on.

There are many examples of this thinking in action, and the place most people point to is RMI’s famous book –Natural Capitalism. But these are also very difficult – they take incredible creativity, and extremely well-functioning teams that get the concept and are committed to it. It requires understanding systems-thinking – ie understanding the entire system you’re operating in, as well as the system(s) it exists within (e.g. a ski company, in the town of aspen, in CO, in the USA, in the biosphere), the various components of that system - internal (world-views, cultures) and external (structures, rules, norms) - and the relationships and interactions between those components. This is very complex stuff and most people, even if they have this understanding (like Schendler) don’t necessarily have the tools and skills to foster that in everyone their working with – and as the quote above indicates, it looks like he hasn’t been able to do that. When this does happen the whole ROI picture changes from kWh saved per dollar invested to a much more interesting equation that can show dramatic increases in productivity, employee morale, and brand goodwill – things that absolutely dwarf energy costs in an ROI calculation.

This is not surprising from a pioneer working in relative isolation like himself. As he indicates, it's easy to start compromising, and being overtaken by the institutional culture they find themselves within, which can be incredibly difficult to change. But at the end of the day, that is what ‘going green’ really requires – and that’s why it’s so hard. It is dramatic, transformational change.

He took an approach of selling and convincing, which clearly hasn’t totally worked. Focusing on the ‘art and practice’ of organizational learning has shown more success (but definitely not 100%) in getting people engaged on these issues, finding meaning in them and then acting accordingly. In the hotel example, of course the guy didn’t want to just slam in CFLs he knew nothing about – and it’s clear Auden didn’t know much about managing 5-star hotels – this is a classic example of needing everyone. If he instead took the time to help the manager and all the staff learn about the importance, and then gave them the tools with which to evaluate their own situation, using their own expertise, and find the appropriate, innovative, creative solutions, they might have had better luck.

I do agree with this: Much corporate environmentalism boils down to misleading statistics and hype.

But that doesn’t mean it all does, or that it necessarily has to be the case.

This last paragraph is the only one that really gets to the heart of the issue: "His former mentor Lovins says Schendler could find further cost-saving energy efficiencies with more support from his superiors. But this mind-set, Schendler warns, could influence companies to pursue exclusively projects with quick payoffs: 'The idea that green is fun, it's easy, and it's profitable is dangerous. This is hard work. It's messy. It's not always profitable. And companies have to get off the mark and start actually doing stuff.'"

Lovins is right – but it’s more than just his superiors (he’s very close to the top already, and they’re obviously supportive of him – they just don’t quite get it – and that’s probably in large part a result of his approach) – it’s also his ‘inferiors’ – EVERYONE in the company down to the lifties and janitors have to be behind this and stoked about it for it to work in a way that truly is profitable and effective.

In addition to having that engagement and creative energy from people throughout the organization, this whole case underscores the need for a long-term, strategic perspective when tackling sustainability from an organizational stand-point, and a common, practical framework to make that context more tangible and useful for all of the people involved with the organization.

This is clearly the best quote from the whole thing: Schendler replied: "Relax, brah. I enormously appreciate all the support.... We're on the edge of this thing, figuring it out. If it were simple and easy, someone would have done it already."

Stay going...