SDCA

THE ENVIRONMENT'S NEW BLING: SUSTAINABILITY

Found this relevant Boston Globe article on an Ecosystem Marketplace website and thought you might be interested. The full text is attached below for viewing.

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe
April 21, 2005, Thursday THIRD EDITION
OP-ED; Pg. A15
840 words
THE ENVIRONMENT'S NEW BLING
By Chip Giller

ENVIRONMENTALISM, long a movement accused of Chicken Little scare tactics and doomsday prophesying, recently reached new depths of gloominess when it announced the death of itself.

At a meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, two movement insiders, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, presented an obituary-cum-call-to-arms titled, bluntly, "The Death of Environmentalism." Like most public deaths, this one was sensational, at least within environmental circles, which have been buzzing ever since with ripostes and postmortems.

There's no question that the folks in the undertaker camp have a point. In the face of an unprecedented assault on the environment by the Bush administration, mainstream environmental groups are proving almost entirely impotent. They have lost crucial ground on hugely important battles (drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, mercury emissions from power plants), and entire wars (the importance of multilateralism, the role of federal regulatory agencies, the input of impartial scientists).

Worse still, they have been unable to mount a resistance to the administration's reckless disregard for global climate change, the most important environmental issue and one of the most important human rights issues of our time.

The leaders of the organizations are working hard for a good cause; this planet and its people need their collective expertise, dedication, and clout. But we also need them to step back and take a look at what they're doing and what they aren't.

Instead of a broad, values-based vision, they're offering up narrow policy fixes. Instead of reaching out to young people of all backgrounds, they're preaching to a middle-aged, upper-middle-class choir. Instead of looking at the plight of inner cities and rural areas, they're focusing on urban sprawl and wild lands.

Instead of connecting environmental concerns to unemployment, outsourcing, rising health care costs, rising gas prices, and rising disease rates in short, to the issues that matter most to tens of millions of people they're talking a language almost no one speaks: CAFE standards, NSR rules, POPs treaties.

What ought to be the biggest of big tents has become, well, a yurt. But if we turn away from the D.C.-centric public face of the environmental movement, a very different picture emerges. In cities nationwide, young professionals are giving environmentalism a new cultural cachet. They're enjoying the benefits of compact, well-designed neighborhoods where it's easy to walk and take public transportation. They're buying shares in Community Supported Agriculture. They're trading in their SUVs for minis. They're finding that many of the hippest products clothes, accessories, home furnishings, appliances are made with environmental concerns in mind.

Sustainability is the new bling. In rural America, residents are recognizing the potential of wind power, solar energy, biodiesel, and other green industries to revitalize their communities. Farmers are discovering the advantages of precision agriculture. Communities are fighting the stench, pollution, and economic ravages of factory farms.

Sustainability is the new self-reliance. In churches, mosques, and temples, religious leaders are taking seriously their responsibility as stewards of God's creation. They are retrofitting their places of worship for energy efficiency, spreading the word to their congregations, banding together to pressure politicians, and asking, "What would Jesus drive?"

Sustainability is the new grace. In minority and low-income communities all over the country, civil rights activists are linking disparate struggles poverty, criminal justice, transportation, climate change, health to continue the path-breaking work of the environmental-justice movement. Sustainability is the new dream.

In the marketplace, green technologies and industries are among the fastest growing and most innovative developments. The Toyota Prius has defied every prediction to become the must-have car. The organic food business doubles every time you blink. Green architecture is taking off. Renewable energy, emissions trading, environmentally conscious investing: Many of the most exciting advances in environmental thinking are happening in the private sector.

Sustainability is the new bottom line. Business people, religious leaders, farmers, activists, urban hipsters you can't kill a hydra with that many heads. Environmentalism as a narrowly focused D.C. lobby might be struggling, but a common-sense conviction that sustainability is integral to our quality of life and our economic competitiveness is on the rise. That's as it should be.

This warming, crowded, industrialized planet of ours faces real and substantive problems, and if we want to protect its inhabitants, we need creativity and commitment as broad and deep as the problems we face. That's not the work of a movement; it's the work of a nation.

Chip Giller is the founder and editor of Grist.org, a magazine of environmental news and commentary.

April 21, 2005

Measuring the right things means a chance of achieving the right goals

The pundits claim “If it isn’t being measured, it isn’t being managed” (generally attributed to Peter Drucker) and how we have become masters of measuring. We measure everything from sales, return on equity, unemployment, sheep in the national flock, the cost of a basket of goods and the growth rates of each of these, seasonally adjusted of course.

Endless streams of data report on how we are progressing. “Progressing towards what?” the astute (or innocent) observer may query. And that is at the core of our current sustainability problem.

The Australian government has set strong goals for economic growth in terms of GDP per capita and GDP growth and is set to achieve them with a healthy surplus besides. But what are we measuring? What is the ultimate goal?

A goal of improved economic performance is surely a statement wishing a better quality of life. However it is becoming increasingly evident that the answer to the question posed by Myers (2002) "Does the good life truly rest with piling up more and more goodies?" might just be no.

Why should you listen to the deliberations of some faceless blogger? Consider some of the facts being published by institutions such as Redefining Progress, the United Nations, The Australia Institute and many more.

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) is being touted by these organizations as an alternative to the ubiquitous GDP. GPI is calculated from the same consumption data as GDP with a couple of differences.
GPI rewards economic “goods”:
 Volunteer work
 Rearing children
 Natural habitats retained

And penalises economics “bads”
 Resource depletion
 Pollution
 Cleaning up pollution
 Costs of crime and crime prevention

GPI avoids the perverse situation described by Redefining Progress where it was suggested that the devastating fires in southern California would produce a much needed boost to regional GDP through the rebuilding of homes. The Exxon oil spill in Alaska is well known as being a boost for the local GDP because consumption is all good good good for GDP, regardless of its source. This is why most western countries can be shown to have falling GPI (or real quality of life) in spite of ever increasing GDP.

But there are pockets of resistance in places such as the Netherlands (Myers 2002) and Santa Monica (Venetoulis, et al 2004) where use of GPI has displayed the true cost of our lifestyles and those areas are turning the tide and building a culture and the supporting infrastructure for sustainability.

As with monitoring of any system, industry or business there must be an alignment of the performance indicators to the strategy or purpose. If not, the system will be refined to greater alignment with its performance indicators to the detriment of the original goal. A company which only measures success by sales without considering profit will have difficulty with the payroll at the end of the month.

While we tolerate GDP to be quoted to us proof of economic growth we are accepting that degradation of our lifestyles is good news for our economy. I encourage you all to go forth from this blog, form my opinion (it is right – trust me) and demand better reporting from our economists, governments and the press.

Eco-firms see growing profits

Picked up this story in one of my RSS feeds the other day from The Christian Science Monitor and thought it might be of some interest. The article is pasted below should the hyperlink be broken.

from the April 07, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0407/p14s02-sten.html

Eco-firms see growing profits
By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
For every overfished ocean reef, every polluted bay, clear-cut forest, and degraded ecosystem on the planet, there should be someone like Keith Bowers out there fixing it up - and there soon could be.

Mr. Bowers can often be found floating face down in Chesapeake Bay in his wet suit and snorkel, grabbing eel-grass plugs from a floating cooler, then swimming down five to 10 feet to stick them in the bay floor.

Replanting eel grass lost to pollution won't restore this bay to its original clean, healthy condition - at least not by itself. But it's a step in the right direction. And a lucrative one. Bowers, who heads a 20-year-old ecosystem restoration company called Biohabitats Inc., is part of a growing phalanx of private companies who make their own green by restoring wetlands and other habitat.

Just a niche market in the 1980s, ecosystem restoration has surged in the past five years, with announced multi-year projects exceeding $70 billion worldwide and annual revenues in the US of more than $1 billion a year, industry sources say.

"From an ecological restoration standpoint, there's something on the order of tens of billions of dollars in the pipeline just in this country," says Bowers, who also is chairman of the Society for Ecological Restoration International in Tucson, Ariz. The group has 2,500 members and 14 international chapters - most of those added in just the past decade.

Some projects are easy to count. Chesapeake Bay is a multiyear, $19 billion cleanup project, Bowers notes. Another mammoth project is the Everglades wetlands restoration in Florida, with $8 billion appropriated. And billions more are being spent in the United States on restoring estuaries, watersheds, rivers, deltas, and fish species such as salmon.

Funding for such obvious restoration projects far exceeds global funding for basic conservation. Because of that, future restoration will one day be a mammoth industry vital to the planet's well-being, some say. Already ecological restoration is a major part of a "huge, almost entirely hidden" economic sector in which more than $1 trillion is being poured into restoration, much of which benefits the environment, says Storm Cunningham, an ecorestoration advocate in Alexandria, Va.

Why hidden? Because accounting for new construction is detailed and well-defined, while infrastructure restoration that helps ecosystems, such as upgraded sewer systems, are rarely accounted as ecosystem restoration. So little data are available, he says.

"The majority of economic activity is restorative but nobody acknowledges it because our systems are still in old-frontier mode," Mr. Cunningham says. "We've come to assume that economic growth is synonymous with conquering new lands and extracting virgin resources."

In his 2002 book on the subject, Cunningham's trillion-dollar estimate includes billions spent on municipal sewer infrastructure, brownfields redevelopment, and environmental and ecosystems remediation.

One sign that this integrated vision of ecoremediation is catching on can be found at Clemson University in South Carolina. Its newly formed Restoration Institute announced plans last fall to pull together professors of architecture, urban planning, and the sciences in an effort to graduate students who are able to meet a new generation of complex challenges.

"We live for the first time in an urban world, so whenever you go to build something new, you're really having to restore something," says Janice Schach, director of the new institute. "If it's not historical buildings being restored, then it's infrastructure like sewers and ecological systems like rivers and watersheds."

Others, such as the Environmental Business Journal (EBJ), an environment industry trade publication, see a positive but more subdued picture. Overall, the environmental- services industry generated $230 billion in revenues in the US and $580 billion worldwide in 2003. That included spending on water systems, garbage disposal, air-pollution control, and other services.

But EBJ counts only annual revenues - not multiyear appropriations. And within the global picture, remediation efforts such as pollution-site cleanups accounted for a far smaller $6.3 billion in 2003. Still smaller is the "natural resources management" segment within which Everglades and Chesapeake Bay cleanups fall, where revenues were about $1.2 billion last year, EBJ says.

"We are seeing healthy growth of about 10 percent a year in natural resources management," says Grant Ferrier, editor of EBJ. "It's the fastest growing segment and there's going to be more demand going forward."

Tetra Tech, one of the largest environmental remediation companies in the US, is capitalizing on that demand. It recently finished a seven-year program aimed at developing sustainable fisheries management in more than 100 coastal villages in the Philippines. Result: a 10 to 20 percent increase in fish density.

"We see restoring ecosystems as a tremendous growth area," says Mark Johnson, a senior vice president for the company in Pasadena, Calif. "We're doing a lot of work to restore fisheries and institute coastal management overseas, a lot for the World Bank."

The End of Poverty

Concerned with the legacy of environmental threats and depleted resources that we are leaving to this and future generations, including my two children aged 7 and 5 years old, I came across an excerpt of the book The End of Poverty by Jeff Sachs in the TIME Magazine of 14 March 2005. The paper outlines the most significant issues regarding the concept of Sustainable Development in today’s society.

Jeff Sachs appeals to the concepts of Intra-generational justice for development, where the objectives on the three dimensions of economy, environment and society are the reduction of poverty, environmental justice (laws and regulation) and democracy and participation.

After analysing the recommendations made by Jeff Sachs, I realised that even the experts in SDCA have omitted important factors affecting the EEE concept. Jeff Sachs shows one way of eliminating poverty by 2025; it describes the responsibilities of governments, organisations, corporations and individuals. However, as David McAdam wisely concluded in his Thought Leaders or Corporations blog, it will be up to the individual to lead the transition to a society where the future generations are not impacted by today’s actions.

Coming from a developing economy, Colombia, my footprint was less intensive than most of my peers in the QUT EMBA, in fact was below the 7.6 average of Australia but way above the 1.3 of Colombia. It is easy for you compare against a standard like Australia, but much more difficult for you to understand how the developing economies struggle in today’s world to maintain acceptable living standards.

However, even David might recognise, the role of corporate and government institutions must be the implementation of policies that allow developing economies easy access to technology and health. Example, genetically modified foods are controversial but you cannot deny the potential benefits for all, if crops are more growth (higher throughput per Ha) and service efficient (vitamins and vaccines) whilst reducing the maintenance factor.

Jeff Sachs tries hard to make the reader understand the importance of the Growth factor on the EEE, but neglects the other three: services, maintenance and eco-efficiency. The comments about education seem to fall in the category of formal education and tend to forget about the culture. Sachs recognises that having access to information is vital for any developing economy in order to understand its place and role in the world; but this might result in some kind of alienation if education is standardised around the globe. Is this the price society has to pay for eradicating poverty around the world?

In the same TIME Magazine edition on pp. 51-53, there is a very insightful article explaining the role of the poor in today’s democracies and the potential impact on the world’s socio-political climate. The article cites as an example India, but this could be extrapolated to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the near future the industrialised countries may have to deal with individuals, leaders representing the poor (the great majority in most developing economies), and the world will see a new wave of development in which the poor will try to gain access to the same living standards of industrialised countries. Developed economies must change their patterns of consumption (paradigm shift), or the world will see a trend towards non-sustainable development.

In order to end poverty, every individual needs to internalise the externalities surrounding it and acknowledge and take action against the damage we, as individuals, are causing to the natural capital (planet) and the society (people), at the expense of profits for only a few individuals.

Education, Technology Development and Technology Transfer to poor communities must be the everyday activity of individuals, governments, organisations and corporations. The concepts of EEE could be the standard around the world for the evaluation of projects to measure the CSR. Worldwide implementation of the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) would aid monitor the real wealth of the country and the impact in the triple bottom line (people, planet and profit).

My Mid Life Crisis: Sustainability or Not

They look me in the eye and say
Dad were you sustainable today
The air is hot and seas are rising
Did that oil and gas company do some compromising?

So to all that read this ode
Please realise we are at the crossroad
The world is crying for us to be able
So use the options, become sustainable

By Richard Schokman
3rd April 2005

Natural Capitalism in a Robot World?

I recently saw the movie Robots. Since popular culture probably has a bit more of an impact on the real future of our world, that being the younger generation, analysing the messages in this movie can provide some value. Without ruining the movie for anyone, the basic premise is a completely mechanical world of all Robots. The natural world is completely mimicked; the robots have babies that grow up just like children, except they are delivered in a box, assembly required, and their parts are replaced every year with bigger parts. They even have birds, but these too are of course mechanical. Starting to sound a bit like biomimicry to me.

The ‘bad guy’ is the new leader of a large corporation, who has conspired with an evil scrap yard owner, to increase profits: stop making replacement parts. All the ‘undesirable’ robots will fall apart, and they will collect and melt all the pieces and use them to make only completely new models, for which they can get more profit. While their methods are questionable giving a negative connotation to it, this demonstrates the reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles, further enhancing the biomimicry message.

This also however has the Robot economy moving from more of a service and flow economy to a product orientated relationship with the big corporation. The hero of the movie however decides to capitalise on the “need” he sees in the market and “fills that need” with a robot repair service, giving the service and flow economy strategy a positive portrayal. The hero also manages to stand up to the big corporation and everyone in Robot City rallies behind him, showing that you can make a difference.

While the Robot world seems devoid of natural capital, Robots does demonstrate a couple of the Natural Capitalism strategies for the future generation. Too bad the “see a need, fill the need” entrepreneurial message of the movie didn’t have more ecological connections and that the reuse of waste wasn’t shown in a more positive light.

The Challenge of Post-Materialism

I have been wondering if the prudent pessimist view of the world reflected in GSN480 and Hawken et al are a true reflection of our human nature and human development over the last 200 years and their effect on sustainability.

While at the beach over Easter I was lucky to read an article by Richard Eckersley in the Weekend Financial Review dated March 24-28th 2005. The philosopher, Dennis Kenny, argues that humanity has gone through four phases - the enchanted universe, the universe of Christianity, the universe of Newtonian physics and the organic universe of Einstein where the distinction between the material and spiritual no longer makes much sense. He argues that we are on the threshold of a new ‘creative’ universe where the human species takes full control of the future. Eckersley argues in this universe that human beings take control for their future away from authorities who believe they have a blind mandate from God, nature, history or the market.

This is a shift away from material progress based on self-interest, competitive individualism and shallow democracy (of tax cuts) to a new world view framed by sustainable development and based on altruistic, co-operate individualism, greater social cohesion, strong communities and a heightened quality of life and well being. This world where quality of life and moral autonomy are priorities has been evidenced by the recent strong growth in the % of population which are ‘culturally creative’.

This greater consciousness of the costs to society and environment will ultimately translate from our homes to business in terms of corporate responsibility and how companies compete with each other. In the creative world we will find win-wins between business and the environment and successful companies will compete based on sustainability because this is what the consumers and population at large will want.

In my quiet moments I reflect on the damage that the human species has done to itself and the world around it. However, when I look at my children and how they perceive the world and their responsibilities in it, I take some comfort and hope for the future.