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.

Just a few more months…

Robert Kennedy, Jr. had a great piece in this year’s Vanity Fair Green Issue out this month. It’s a quick 2-page manifesto outlining the next president’s first task: rapid decarbonization.

He eloquently highlights an analogy that we use a lot in fight against climate change – the fight to abolish slavery (Hawken dives into this comparison as well in Blessed Unrest). The core issues are essentially the same – vested interests that would have to adapt argue that the morally correct route would devastate the economy. It didn’t then and it won’t now.

The article is available online here: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/rfk_manifesto200805?currentPage=1.

He also outlines a few priorities for immediate action – doing a great job of succinctly describing the major policy shifts that would accelerate the shift, giving us a chance at avoiding the worst impacts of climate disruption, and developing a resilient economy. Cap and trade is the first, and all but an inevitability (we just need to ensure that it’s strong, clear, and effective). The second is a grid overhaul and a shift to DC transmission to allow the scaling up of clean energy. The Greenland team has been working on this issue, and will be taking that work to the next level, so you’ll most likely be seeing more on the subject here in coming months. And of course the big surge in efficiency: buildings that are net-positive in energy production, dramatic increases in vehicle mileage, better urban planning, etc. I’m just back from an interesting event with a group of university facilities managers to co-draft a resource for facilities professionals on their role in implementing the ACUPCC – this kind of dramatic efficiency increases will be key – beyond the add-on approaches to truly integrated design. The RMI Built Environment Team has a great new web resource with case studies of the projects on which they’ve fostered this approach.

Exciting stuff. There are signs the shift is starting to happen – we’ve just got to do our best to do it right, while doing it quickly. The Myanmar devastation offers another stark reminder as to why. Stay going.

Blessed Unrest

Since I started this blog, I’ve been meaning to include short little recaps of the books I read (that are worth recapping)… I’m finally going to give it a shot and get in the habit, starting out with one that definitely needs to be recapped: Blessed Unrest, by Paul Hawken.

Paul Hawken has written some of the most influential books in the sustainability movement – clearly articulating the latest thinking and usually driving it further. Among his big ones are The Ecology of Commerce – which changed the lives of many people, including Ray Anderson, founder of Interface carpet, who has since become an incredible role-model for sustainable business, and went on to write his own very influential book, which has also changed many lives: Mid-Course Correction. He was also a co-author of Natural Capitalism, which was the one that really did it for me.

So, Blessed Unrest – the subtitle pretty much sums it up: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. The largest movement doesn’t have a name. It’s been referred to as the “movement of movements.” It consists of 1-2 million environmental, social justice, and indigenous people’s rights organizations, and hundreds of millions of people.

People have been noticing this phenomenon in various ways for years. I first really consciously recognized its existence in 2005, but hadn’t really seen it articulated. We talked about it in various ways in Sweden. Manfred Max-Neef referred to its participants as the “mosquitoes.” Pestering the deeply entrenched, established, and powerful interests of unfettered self-interest in order to protect the (very large) segments of global human society and the ecological systems (upon which we all depend) that so often bear the brunt of that self-interest – in essence working to stop unsustainable activity and create a sustainable society. The workings of this entrenched self-interest is well articulated in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – particularly the eloquence with which the author describes how the negative – mostly unintended – consequences are less the result of diabolical, immoral, individuals (although there are some driving these processes) and more the result of outdated worldviews and dogmatic, oversimplified ideas about economic development and the best ways to design our society to meet human needs.

Back to the book – in addition to exploring this movement, and attempting to enhance it by facilitating its interconnections, primarily through the social networking site WiserEarth (go sign-up and join, and connect to the Stratleade organization!) – Blessed Unrest does a great job of driving home a central point of sustainability, and one I try to convey on this blog. That is that sustainability is not merely environmentalism, and it is as much about social systems and social justice. He closes with a great line while talking about how it makes sense that the environmental movement is getting on the social justice bus, and the social justice movement is getting on the environmental bus, “because in the end, there is only one bus.”

The bus:

A great example of this concept that has been exploding is the green collar jobs phenomenon – an immensely powerful, and important message, and a exciting vehicle for creating a sustainable society. Van Jones has emerged as a great spokesman for this movement, and it is one we should all look for ways to support in our communities, businesses, personal lives, etc. Fast Company recently ran a great piece on Van and green collar jobs – worth the read.

Blessed Unrest provides a good background on the environmental and social justice movements and does a good job setting the historical context. It covers globalization and its discontents and the importance of Seattle, the rights of business (see previous post for a related discussion on the burden of proof), the inherent interconnectedness of all of us, and our common ancestry of the single cell, and much more, in a coherent storyline. It shows how in many ways this movement is emerging to serve as the collective immune system for the ‘organism’ that is humanity in the biosphere. The increased communication and partnership between NGOs, social entrepreneurs, and change agents is a big part of this. I’ve been experiencing some of the effectiveness of those kinds of partnership through the ambassador program we’ve been developing to help grow the ACUPCC.

All around, exciting stuff, and one to put on the ‘must read’ list. 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…

Democracy and Sustainability

Some new slides from big Al at this year's TED talks - http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007974.html. And a needed jolt about the importance of putting in some sensible laws to increase our chances of survival living under the laws of thermodynamics.

And a good, quick way to take some political action - check out www.PowerVote.org and sign the pledge... let's rally up around the common enemy of unsustainability, move past the partisan politics, and amp it up on redesigning our society so we can thrive and improve our quality of life by living within sustainability constraints.

Stay going...

Dictatorship and unsustainability

Yesterday’s WSJ had an interesting piece from Morgan Tsvangirai, the president of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Zimbabwe’s main opposition party. He ran through the main points of the corruption and totalitarianism of the ruling ZANU PF regime, headed up by Mugabe.

I studied in Zim for a few months in the fall of ’99, when things were still pretty good, and the country was a model for African independence and success. That spring was the election that really changed all of that – it was clear the vote was stolen and that Democracy in Zimbabwe was over. Since then the situation has deteriorated – land seizures, voter intimidation, cronyism, outrageous spending on personal luxuries while the population starves… it gets worse. Our prof from my time there has kept us posted over the years with inside accounts of what’s happening on the ground. It’s heart breaking.

Hyperinflation has been out of control for years – current stats are around 150,000% or something ridiculous, with unemployment at 80%. Clearly, the situation is unsustainable.

Recently, a colleague mentioned that we need to deepen the dialogue around sustainability – to address questions like ‘is it possible to have a sustainable dictatorship?’ For me, the question illustrates how approaching sustainability without a concrete working definition can create confusion. And, as confusion can stifle action, or lead to misguided action, this can be dangerous in the face of the urgent threat of unsustainability.

Using the 4 Sustainability Principles as our definition of a sustainable society, we know it’s not possible to have a sustainable dictatorship. The 4^th principle states that in a sustainable society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their basic needs. The situation in Zimbabwe is clearly causing circumstances that make it impossible for people to meet their basic need for subsistence – to simply stay alive – some are being killed, more are starving. This is not a sustainable society –something needs to give, and something will.

More generally speaking, the circumstances resulting from dictatorships are not always so dire. But, by definition, a dictatorship systematically undermines people’s capacity to meet their need for Participation – another basic need that we all have. It systematically undermines people’s capacity to meet their need for Freedom, as well. So by definition, it’s not possible to have a sustainable dictatorship. That’s not to say they can’t last for a long time. We know we can exhibit unsustainable behavior for long periods of time. But we also know at some point there will be undesirable consequences for people and other life. There are basic, underlying design flaws. Dictatorships are a dramatic illustration as to how abuses of power create unsustainable situations and negative impacts. They’re also a good example of how sustainability is not just about the environment. It’s about people live fulfilling lives on planet earth.

That’s a tough thing to do in Zimbabwe right now. And the situation has no easy answers – the country’s entrenched in downward spiral, created and influenced by a complex blend of historical context, cultural realities, international pressures, forces of the global economy, and so much more. Of course a return to democracy, a transfer of power, and a win for the opposition would be a huge step, and one I pray will come soon. There have been many calls but little action from the international community, no oil, of course - although China's been showing interest, presumably due to the food export potential. But as we know, we're all in this together, and while this may seem like an unfortunate, but isolated and irrelevant situation from our lives, it's not. For the people of Zimbabwe; Stay going.

Tulane - 500th Signatory to the ACUPCC

I've been dying to write on quite a few topics of late - but it's been a busy time personally and professionally - which is all great, but not so much for the blog. The Bear collapse and Fed bailout needs to be covered from a sustainability perspective, what it means, why it happened, and the risks associated with a corollary event on a larger scale as the GDP growth-for-its-own-sake goal drives us to do crazy things.

But for now, just a quick note on a happier topic - Tulane University just publicly announced that they were the 500th signatory to the ACUPCC. This is a huge landmark for the initiative - putting it halfway to its goal of 1000 signatories - and incredible powerful to have it come from Tulane, which is still feeling the effects first hand of what climate disruption can bring.

For the full press release, check out - http://tulane.edu/news/releases/pr_031808.cfm.

The announcement also timed up with the first meeting of the CGI U - Clinton Global Initiative University - which is garnering great commitments from students, faculty, and administrators to create positive change. www.cgiu.org.

And while we're on the topic of garnering commitments and bringing the ACUPCC closer to 1,000, check out the Facebook page we've created to help students and alumni get involved and encourage their presidents to sign on - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=32064695003

much more to follow in coming months... in the meantime, stay going.