*Alan's had a job-of-work lately. The world is destabilizing faster than it can be sustained.
Riding the Sustainability Whirlwind
Never a dull moment in the sustainability business.
Right about now, I should have been finishing a report on a “Green Transformation Strategy” for the Egyptian economy, for ultimate delivery to the Egyptian Prime Minister. That project is obviously on indefinite hold.
A report on happiness and economics for a new Japanese institute is also delayed, for obvious reasons (though it will be finished in a few weeks). And I have just discovered that my “environmentally friendly” car has become an environmental enemy. (See the P.S.)
These, among many other tumultuous things, at scales both small and breathtakingly large, are part of 2011's "Sustainability Whirlwind."
The last few months have been truly astonishing, heartbreaking, mesmerizing times for anyone working in sustainability. During this period, I have had a difficult time separating out issues that are global, personal, and business-related ... because all these dimensions seem to blend together.
The revolutionary upheaval in the Middle East I personally find very exciting, but I am alternately moved, frightened, inspired, and worried, depending on the day, and depending on the emails I receive from friends and clients in the region. Some are in ecstasy over new-found freedoms; others are facing uncertain personal and career futures. Since the region is a global geo-political fulcrum, I find myself watching it like a hawk. But I also have to rethink some of my company's business planning, since we had several projects in the region that are seriously affected by events there now.
Meanwhile, we are working on a report for the newly created, Tokyo-based Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy, and Society (which I wrote about in the last WaveFront). The Sendai Earthquake struck Japan just days after my visit there. I sat in shock in front of the TV in my hotel room in Phoenix, Arizona – I was there to keynote Resilience 2011, an international science conference – and I called up in my mind's eye the places I had been in Tokyo, just days before. I imagined those places shaking violently. It was all too easy to see the faces of my friends in Japan, trying to control panic, scrambling to safety.
Now they are trying to cope with the aftermath of the first nuclear accident since Chernobyl to receive a rating of “7” on the nuclear catastrophe scale, as I heard just this morning via Swedish radio. (This rating works like the earthquake Richter scale, meaning that a “7” is actually 100 times worse than a “5” – which was the official rating of the Japanese government previously.)
Needless to say, these events certainly have their impact on how to frame, for a Japanese audience, the current upsurge in interest in “Gross National Happiness” – which has emerged as a complement, though not a replacement, to the Gross Domestic Product. The governments of China, the UK, France, and Japan have all been studying this idea, first popularized by the Kind Bhutan. In March, China formally incorporated a reduction in GDP growth, and an increase in focus on happiness and wellbeing, into its newly announced 5-Year Plan. Japan had been struggling with stagnant economic growth; it made sense to start talking about maximizing happiness, rather than maximizing GDP. But the earthquake/tsunami is a mega-event whose long-term impact on Japan’s economy is impossible to predict. The weird thing about the GDP is that Japan’s might actually rise significantly (after falling), starting next year, as the country recovers and rebuilds.
This is not the first time my company's work on sustainability has been impacted by what systems people call “nonlinear events” – unpredictable shifts in how a system is working, "shocks to the system," caused by some combination of external events and internal thresholds of stability being crossed.
We were working in New Orleans, and witnessing some amazing successes there for sustainability, just when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 (see my book The Sustainability Transformation for the story).
One of our regional ISIS Academy training workshops had to be canceled when Bangkok erupted in violent protests a couple of years ago. Events like these directly impact our bottom line as a business – but obviously, we don’t spend too much time thinking about that. The other impacts, from global political shifts to the vast scale of human suffering, are what one thinks about (and feels about).
Events like these are hard lessons for the world in sustainability and its sister concept, resilience. Japan’s earthquake would have been a catastrophe in any case; but that natural disaster’s “interaction” (if we can call it that) with human technologies like vulnerable nuclear power plants multiplied the damage by several orders of magnitude. Japan will recover, and it has shown remarkable resilience as a nation during this time; but core economic processes are still disrupted. And in some ways, the nation will never be the same.
In Egypt, some sort of “nonlinear event” in the politics of that country seemed inevitable to many observers, because of the social, economic, and resource pressures that were building up – just as the tectonic plates had been building pressure off the coast of Japan. Egypt is, everyone hopes, gaining something profoundly important in this revolutionary shift to a new form of government. But Egypt is also losing time. Egypt is in a very serious race against time, particularly on issues of food, water, and energy security. The race is driven by demographic and physical processes that are not slowing down.
One hopes that the “new Egypt” will be better able to respond to these emerging challenges than the old one, and quickly; but at the moment, the "nonlinear event" of the revolution has stalled the other “necessary revolution” (as Peter Senge calls the shift to sustainability). It has also sidelined, distracted, or thoroughly disempowered some of Egypt’s own leaders who were best able to lead that other revolution (anyone associated with the previous government is suspect).
As I say, never a dull moment in the sustainability business, which has sometimes given me an observation post on the world that feels uncomfortably close to dramatic, historic events. While most of the reflections above are analytical, I spend equal amounts of time, it seems, processing the powerful emotions that witnessing such things can stir up – and trying to send messages of hope and encouragement to the people I know whose lives are directly and personally affected by what the world reads in the newspapers.
But meanwhile, out of the glare of these attention-grabbing global events, lots of other things are happening, including in our business. We are watching more and more schools and universities adopt our “Compass Education” approach – a very exciting development, for the Compass provides them with a unifying symbol and tool for both learning and institutional management. We are developing new courses for professional development through ISIS Academy that seem to be taking root even faster than we were hoping (more on this below). And we are watching our corporate clients make great strides forward in sustainability management as well ... and these are stories I look forward to telling in a future edition of WaveFront.
For now, I close with yet another message of hope, encouragement, worry, support, and, yes, love for all my friends and colleagues who are struggling with the aftermath of these “nonlinear events” in their nations and in their lives. May you – may we all – persevere in the pursuit of a sustainable future.
No matter what.
Alan AtKisson
PS: About my car: I just learned that Sweden has started importing corn-based ethanol from the US, to make up for the fact that Brazil is not exporting sugarcane-based ethanol to us anymore. This makes that our ethanol car – which was a fantastic carbon dioxide reducer when we bought it nearly ten years ago, and it was running on Swedish forest-based ethanol – has become a worse polluter than a similar petrol-powered car. Good thing it's biking season now.
PPS: About WaveFront: This is the second time I have considered changing the name of this newsletter because of worries that "WaveFront" might raise uncomfortable associations with tsunamis. After the 2004 tsunami in Asia, we dropped the name WaveFront for a few years. This time, we will keep it. There are good waves, and bad waves, and WaveFront celebrates the wave of change for sustainability that is also sweeping over our world, through governments, companies, communities, schools, indeed, nearly everywhere.
/AA
