For several years I have been actively involved in the creation of sustainability reports, and more recently, the creation of an underlying sustainability “narrative” for companies in a variety of industrial sectors.  That experience has taught me three important lessons: (1) if the sustainability story doesn’t logically align with the organization’s broad strategy – and more to the point, create some uniqueness or differentiation for the organization – the effort, however well-intentioned, will fail to deliver the results it could; (2) most organizations and their advisors make the inadvertent mistake of thinking that more data and more information will result in a better report or story.  While there may be times when this is true, I believe less is actually more when it comes to reporting.  The trick is knowing which elements of your organization’s story deserve to be communicated – and in what form – and create something rich and richly interesting around these elements; and (3) unless there is rigorous engagement of your high influence/high impact stakeholders in the creation and review of your report, you can spend much time and money and never really know if you are connecting with the people and organizations who shape the operational and competitive space within which you live and work.

The emergence and (tentative) mainstreaming of sustainability has helped unlock new sources of innovation and opportunity for business – to say nothing of helping to reduce humanity’s footprint on the Earth.  That‘s the good news.  The bad news is that in the rush to demonstrate their sustainability credibility, many companies are spending too much time and money on sustainability reports groaning under the weight of too many “metrics” and “indicators”.  By way of example, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines – an influential set of sustainability reporting tools – suggest up to 81 indicators!  Even the Balanced Scorecard, the most influential strategy measurement template of the past decade, recommends 20-25 measures.  These one-size fits all efforts don’t really speak to or “fit” anyone.  Worse, tracking too many measures may cause managers to lose sight of the few that really drive the achievement of strategic objectives.  Hence, less is actually more when it comes to measuring and communicating sustainability performance.

While the need to measure is intuitively clear – a company needs data to animate the story it wishes to tell – I believe too many companies are trapped by the MBA dogma of “what gets measured gets managed”.  And so it is that well-meaning managers look at a competitors’ sustainability report, or the GRI guidelines, and try to assemble an omnibus set of indicators.  Just because a small amount of strategic measurement is good, it doesn’t follow that a lot of measurement is better.  The important thing is to understand at a deep level what it is about your company’s measurement and communications approach that conveys uniqueness and advantage to you – and justifies the expense associated with measurement and reporting.  With this in mind, I believe the real magic in sustainability communication is threefold:

Step 1: Know who your stakeholders are and what matters to them

Step 2: Know how sustainability drives overall company strategy

Step 3: Focus measurement and communication on 1 and 2

I might add that if you end up with more than 9 measures, you probably have too many.  A 2004 study of successful Balanced Scorecards found that the most effective included a limited number of indicators at the top, with supporting metrics below.  So too with sustainability communications – know what is unique about your company and what will resonate with your stakeholders and focus on this.

Now, lest I be seen as stepping onto the proverbial limb that some readers might want to cut off, let me be clear: I have a keen professional and personal interest in shifting society onto a more sustainable trajectory and I applaud the intellectual and other energy that has given rise to measurement frameworks such as GRI and the Balanced Scorecard.  My concern is that these efforts, however well intentioned, frequently create the impression that “successful” measurement and reporting requires a herculean effort to marshal several different indicators from disparate parts of a company.  Hands up the number of sustainability managers and communications specialists who dread the annual ritual of calling in favours from across the company to assemble the sustainability report?

If we are to establish measures that “make sense” at a deep strategic level and inform powerful communications, it seems to me that we should always begin with an organization’s strategy. Tony Manning, in his handy treatise, Making Sense of Strategy, argued that it is only what is spoken about that will be measured, much less managed. Put another way, it is only what is important to an organization’s leaders, what creates and informs the context or “mental space” in which people work that matters. And so the challenge for those with an interest in sustainability is to become more actively involved in strategy creation, or ensure that they have a solid footing on the strategy or point of view that their organization is seeking to deploy. Measurement efforts must take their cue from this strategic line of sight. And of course, because the real world of strategy is less about tiresome annual planning efforts and more about making decisions “on the run”, some searching questions should underlie any measurement effort: Will this measure contribute to or advance our strategy? Will this measure be useful and meaningful at different levels in the organization? Are we, the architects of sustainability performance measurement part of an ongoing conversation about what lies ahead for our organization?  And most crucially, are the measurement and communications efforts in which we are engaged genuinely building trust capital with our key stakeholders?  Ultimately, it is less about a report or some other communications device and more about the life and habits of your organization.

There are signs of progress. My concerns aside, GRI and the Balanced Scorecard are significant advances over early measurement and reporting frameworks.  But if performance measurement and sustainability are to truly become part of the strategic firmament, the thinking that underlies them must catch up with current thinking about strategy.

Rob Abbott is one of Canada’s leading sustainability strategists, and a frequent media commentator on sustainability/CSR/social venture and business strategy.    Contact him at rob@abbottstrategies.com

 In November of 2011, I was invited to present a series of lectures at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT.  The subject of those lectures was principally, but not exclusively, about sustainability.  During the course of my time on campus it became clear that sustainability was a subject that stirred powerful reactions – both emotional and intellectual, pro and con.  As a result, I wrote this short essay to expand on some of the material covered in my lectures, and to open up new avenues of inquiry into a subject about which I am a passionate advocate.  Comments are welcome and can be addressed to me at rob@abbottstrategies.com.  And of course, if the ideas contained herein resonate for you please share the essay widely.

1.0  Beginning

As a jumping off point for my remarks, I’d like to acknowledge that Bozeman, Montana, like so many other cities in North America, lies in the traditional territory of several Native American peoples.  In the case of Bozeman, these peoples include the Crow, Shoshone, Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Flathead and Sioux.  In this essay I want to talk about sustainability, a word and an idea that has both beguiled and bedeviled many modern scholars and writers, government agencies, activists, lobbyists from both sides of the political divide, and others, but a word that was – and still is – readily understood by indigenous cultures.

Without naively romanticizing the Native American way of life (and those of you who have read Charles Mann’s provocative and popular book, 1491 will know what I mean) these cultures lived in a relationship with the land, in a relationship with nature, that we scarcely understand.  And so it is that many indigenous people ask of us: “If this is your land, where are your stories?”  That is a deeply resonant question for me; a question that strikes at the metaphorical root of how modern society lives, works and plays.  Most of us live at a remove from nature, a remove that blunts our understanding of nature, our dependence on nature, and the damage we are doing to nature.  We go through our days in a quest for ease, comfort and convenience.  And we consume – more and bigger cars, bigger houses, vacations that have a big carbon footprint, and so on.  And all the while, there is a separation of the economy from environmental, social and cultural values; a belief that pollution, or the risk of pollution, is the price of progress, the price of jobs.  This was the mythology in which I grew up in a small pulp and paper mill town in British Columbia, Canada.  The government of the day referred to the smell of the mill that fouled our air as the smell of money.  The economy was seen as separate from the environment, and more important than the environment.  Today, we know better, or at least some of the wise ones among us know better.  Last year, in one of his last public statements on the subject before his death, Ray Anderson, the founder and longtime CEO of Interface, beautifully distilled a lifetime of living and learning through nature into a few powerful lines.  He said:

There is no alternative to protecting nature if we want air, water, soil creation (and thus food), materials, energy, climate regulation, the carbon cycle (including photosynthesis), pollination, seed dispersal, flood and insect control.  Take away any of those and there would be very little economy left.

Is it any wonder that he endowed a Chair in the engineering program at Georgia Tech, his alma mater, the purpose of which was to explain how a forest works?  Even the decision by the US State Department on the Keystone XL pipeline – an interesting and surprising decision by the way – was, at least partly, born out of a concern for the land.  There were other forces at play in that decision, of course, but somewhere the land ethic was at work.

I want to share some ideas with you in this essay that make you think, and see, if not the world, then your community, your business, your job, the various roles you play, a little differently.  In particular, I’d like you all to consider what your dream for Bozeman (or the place where you live) might be – and your role in making that dream a reality because cities, large or small, coastal or inland, are among humanity’s most durable artifacts.  Cities are also, crucially, much more than the sum of their buildings – they are tapestries of human lives and social networks that, at their best, tap the power of the land and evoke the heart and soul of a particular geography – creating a rich narrative of place.  Too often, however, we have not created cities, or rescued existing cities, that reflect this devotion to place, community identity and nature.  I believe that we will make sense of sustainability (or not) at a local level, neighbor-to-neighbor, neighborhood-to-neighborhood.  We will make sense of sustainability in our cities and in the choices we make about how our cities, and the people who live, work and play in them, do things differently and better than before.  Within that context, I’d like to quote from the playwright and former Czech President, Vaclav Havel, who captures on a global scale what I see unfolding:

I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended.  Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born.  It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself – while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.

I want to talk about what might be rising from the rubble. 

2.0  A Brief History Lesson

Interest in and concern for the outcomes of human interaction with the natural world is, of course, not new.  Among other reference points, the earliest recorded story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, commented on the dire social and environmental consequences of forest depletion.  The term “sustainable” was actually first used in Germany in the 18^th century to describe a long-term perspective in forestry.  The emergence of industrial society in Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries sparked debate, especially by the Romantics, who were appalled at the soulless mechanism of the new age and the human consequences of industrialization.  Some of you may remember Charles Dickens’ portrayal of “Coketown” in his novel, Hard Times, a stinging indictment of rapidly industrializing England.  John Ruskin went so far as to coin the term “illth” to describe the side effects of the emerging economic system – poverty, pollution, despair, and illness.  In North America, several initiatives at this time, notably the Regional Planning Association of America, expressed concerns about sustainability–even if this precise term was not yet used.  And of course, the muckrakers of the early 1900s did work that is too often forgotten by present-day sustainability and social justice scholars and practitioners, but that provided an intellectual and moral foundation on which present-day efforts are built.  I would argue that there is a century-long cord connecting the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, with Ida Tarbell’s groundbreaking work, A History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, and Upton Sinclair’s account of the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, published in 1906.  If we are to truly make sense of sustainability, writ large, we need to remember that it is not the latest jeremiad of the modern environmental movement, nor is it a clever marketing campaign dreamed up by an ad agency.  The seeds of the sustainability conversation were sown long ago.

In 1909, the North American Conservation Conference resulted in a Declaration of Principles that called for “legislation to preserve and protect wildlife, to prevent soil erosion and water pollution, and generally to manage renewable resources in such a way as to ensure their continued productivity in the future”.  Even more remarkable when viewed from a remove of nearly 100 years, the Canadian Commission on Conservation in 1915 noted that “each generation is entitled to the interest on the natural capital, but the principal should be handed on unimpaired”.  Sadly, WWI, the stock market crash and Great Depression, and WWII overwhelmed any consideration of how we might adopt such forward-looking perspectives, such sustainability perspectives.  It is only in the post-war economic boom that society remembered the dark shadows at the edge of prosperity.

A reactor fire in 1957 at the Windscale nuclear power plant on the northwest coast of England sounded a cautionary note about human use of the environment and especially the dangers of a technologically advancing civilization.  The fire was shortly followed by evidence of atmospheric contamination in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Denmark.  The nature of the contamination was such that “over an area of 500 square kilometers, milk from farms was declared unfit for human consumption”.

The Resources for Tomorrow Conference in 1961 marked the beginning of a meditation on conservation and environmental management that in many respects continues today.  A year later, Rachel Carson would publish Silent Spring and again, it is important to remember that entrenched interests fought very hard against the message that Ms. Carson delivered.  Nonetheless, the era of   environmental protection legislation was being birthed.  Significant examples include The Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Air and Water Acts.  In the early 1970s, the Man and Resources conference provided a platform for discussion of a theme that would permeate environmental discussions in the United States, Canada and elsewhere for the next two decades, “integrated resource use”.  In hindsight, this can be viewed as a re-launch of the sustainability conversation because it advanced a worldview that sought to achieve “the best possible balance between social and economic demands and ecological implications in the wise use of natural resources”.

In 1980, sustainability took center stage in the World Conservation Strategy by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and in 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development popularized the term in its report, Our Common Future.  Prior to the release of its report, Commission Chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland noted that despite obvious challenges, notably the transformation of decision-making structures and processes to integrate environment and economy, sustainability was not an insoluble problem:

There are many dimensions to sustainability. First, it requires the elimination of poverty and deprivation.  Second, it requires the conservation and enhancement of the resources base, which alone can ensure that the elimination of the poverty is permanent.  Third, it requires a broadening of the concept of development so that it covers not only economic growth but also social and cultural development.  Fourth, and most important, it requires the unification of economics and ecology in decision-making at all levels.

The escape of toxic gas from a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India in 1984 that killed over 6,000 people, and the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer in 1985 were two prominent examples of environmental incidents or discoveries that sharpened society’s appetite for the message of sustainability contained in the World Commission report.  The greatest spur for an alternative human trajectory was, however, the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear station, an event that underscored “humanity’s interconnections and interdependence”.  Following this accident, “grass eaten by lambs in Wales, milk drunk by Poles and Yugoslavs, and air breathed by Swedes were all contaminated by radiation”.  Reminds you a little of the Windscale incident 40 years earlier, no?  In the wake of Chernobyl, the World Commission report sparked debate about the synergistic relationship between economic development, social justice and environmental protection.  This debate would build to a crescendo at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, at the time the largest-ever gathering of heads of state.  Here, leaders from nearly 100 countries sought to develop a global plan for sustainable development.  The key trends that coalesced in the run-up to UNCED were:

• Increasing world population, especially in the southern hemisphere, and an associated increase in the demand for goods and services
• Increasing concentration of world population in cities
• Increasing demands on a limited natural resource base, and the resulting pressure to improve resource productivity
• Increasing access to information on the environmental and social costs of development
• Increasing public concerns about the deterioration of the environment, and the ramifications this has for economic and social welfare

Today, the term “sustainability commonly” encapsulates the values, issues and processes that organizations must follow to do no harm, and to create multiple kinds of value – the simultaneous pursuit of economic prosperity, environmental quality, and social equity.  And so it is that we have the convenient (or not) metaphor of the “triple bottom line”.

It is my belief that, despite many good intentions, the way in which the word “sustainable” has been positioned in the public consciousness, or simply communicated, no longer appropriately articulates the challenges we face as a society, and as individual citizens and organizational leaders wishing to meet those challenges.  The historical tour I’ve just taken you on is an attempt to both remember and recapture the context that we should hold when we talk about sustainable.  And so, for the purposes of my remarks here, I use the term sustainable and its cousin, sustainability, to mean the capacity to endure and thrive.  This is predicated on communities, governments, NGOs, businesses and individual citizens operating not at the expense of the future, but in favor of the future.  This will require a fundamental change in awareness and consciousness with respect to our relationship with nature, and with each other.  Long-held assumptions, especially in the west, about profit maximization, fiduciary responsibility, the role of government, and the responsibilities of individuals – to cite some of the more prominent examples – must be challenged if we are to truly operate in favor of the future.  

3.0         Sustainability is not a Problem to be solved; it is a Future to be created

If there is a single powerful idea I want to share with you it is this: Sustainability is not a problem to be solved; it is a future to be created.  Over the past 25 years I have been fortunate to study businesses around the world, and advise many of those businesses on how to create wealth through a deep integration of sustainability with core business strategy.  I have also taught at several universities in North America and abroad, and supported the work of several non-governmental organizations working at the nexus of business, government and society.  Collectively, these experiences have shown me that whenever sustainability is framed as a “problem”, there is a predictable and largely tactical response.  In contrast, I believe that if sustainability is positioned as a future to be created, new opportunities for creativity and opportunity are possible, new levels of engagement are likely, and a deeper and richer outcome is achievable.

Creating the future requires challenging the structural causes of the sustainability crisis – the tacit agreements between individuals, governments, businesses, and civil society that define the “way things are done” – and proposing alternative models.  This requires acute business and organizational skill and an elegant understanding of core organizational processes (“high system”), but it also requires awareness and understanding of cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening, the importance of relationships, human connections, connections to the natural world, and the realm of personal experience (“high soul”).  This last piece is especially important, I think, and while it is not the exclusive domain or competency of women, women do tend to “get this” and work with this both more often and with greater success than men.

In his extraordinary book, A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright argued persuasively that we now live in a world that has grown too small to forgive human mistakes – and it is this one fact that represents the crux of the sustainability crisis.  As he put it:

The future of everything we have accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years.  Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford.

If you’re keeping score, so to speak, some of the more conspicuous signs of “error” include:

• The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s conclusion that human activity is having a significantly negative and escalating impact on the biodiversity of world ecosystems, reducing both their resilience and bio-capacity.
• Of 24 ecosystem services that were measured, only four have shown improvement over the last 50 years, 15 are in serious decline, and five are in a precarious condition.

• The fact that we are currently witnessing an episode of species extinction greater than anything the world has experienced in the past 65 million years – the greatest rate of extinction since the vanishing of the dinosaurs.  This is happening on our watch, and is largely due to unsustainable methods of production and consumption.

So what is to be done?  I believe the sustainability “crisis” has less to do with a lack of knowledge, will or available solutions and more to do with the absence of skills that are too often seen as “soft”.  These include:

• A fundamental appreciation of social fabric;
• A willingness to engage in the art of conversation and dialogue;
• Skill at both process and outcome; and
• A keen eye and ear for the small units of people that can drive true transformation.

Collectively, this is the ability to “cultivate the wisdom of the group and larger social systems”.  Empirical and anecdotal evidence shows that organizations that cultivate this collective of skills do better than organizations lacking this facility.  And by better I mean superior financial performance; easier access to capital at less cost; superior recruitment and retention of employees, especially key employees; and superior reputation.

One of the most powerful manifestations of the need for what I am calling high system, high soul is in the reaction of the Earth to the devastation that has been brought upon it by largely patriarchal societies that relate to nature as a commodity to be possessed and used, rather than as a mentor or teacher.  The Earth is responding with ever more forceful feedback.  James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia Hypothesis and one of the world’s most influential environmental scientists, describes this as the Earth’s homeostatic mechanism trying to redress the imbalance. According to Lovelock, by 2040, floods, drought and famine will dramatically reduce the world population. The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain. He says:

By 2040, parts of the Sahara desert will have moved into middle Europe.  By  2040 every summer in Europe will be as hot as it was in 2003 – between 43C and 49C (120F). It is not the death of people that is the main problem, it is the fact that the plants can’t grow – there will be almost no food grown in Europe. We are about to take an evolutionary step and my hope is that the species will emerge stronger.

This idea of the human species emerging stronger is about moving to a higher level of consciousness.  If we could describe this process as a grand game or experiment, I would suggest to you that the game is not over, but the conditions and practices that have worked in the past, are completely inadequate for the future.  The game will only continue (and get both better and more interesting) if we recognize and embrace fundamentally different system conditions and operating guidelines.  This can be seen as a conscious shift from “finite games to infinite games” with an associated shift from an emphasis on “winning at all costs” to “extending the game in perpetuity”.  And we need to reevaluate the role – and definition – of leaders within this emerging new game.  It is worth remembering that the expression “to lead” comes from the Latin dio logis, which translates as “to step across the threshold”.  We are at such a threshold and must cultivate a heightened level of consciousness to both recognize this, and meet the challenges associated with stepping across it.   In my experience, those leaders and “manager-leaders” that embody this understand two essential truths:

• Strategy is organic and most properly happens one room at a time, one conversation at a time, yet with the entire system held at the core; and
• True transformation happens through language, generative conversation and individual and collective reflection.

In fact, language and conversation might well constitute a chalice of transformation.  One of the great gaps in North American (if not world) business and organizational culture is the failure to consistently embed the practice of conversation and reflection in the operating environment. Such an approach takes longer initially, but almost invariably leads to outcomes that are more personal, characterized by greater ownership, and more resilient in the face of economic, social and environmental change.  This is in contrast to the prevailing archetype that places an emphasis on decisions and outcomes – regardless of whether those decisions lead in the right direction or result in outcomes that are good for the organization and the communities of which it is a part.  In the competitive business environment and the “value for money” environment that often typifies government, decisions are made quickly, but organizations often find that they have to backtrack and start over because there is insufficient ownership of the decision, or the decision is not resilient in the face of change.  A more reflective, measured approach would almost certainly be superior and come to define a new kind of strategy.

4.0         Moving Forward

Women are frequently leading this change to a new brand of leadership, strategy and sustainability from the inside out, because the concepts of relationship and conversation are more typical of their operating style. However, I’m not suggesting that all we need to do is shift back to a matriarchal society.  As we think about where the pendulum needs to swing, we should think of a conscious move away from the hard masculine “power over” style of management to one that is more focused on relationship.  Among many other shifts, this means:

• Less emphasis on controlled communications and more freeform dialogue
• A shift from ownership to collaboration
• A shift from talking to listening
• And most crucially, a shift from power over to relational intelligence

If science is the art of knowing, and art is the science of feeling, as Christopher Cauldwell memorably put it, then we must know to be able to do, but we must feel to know what to do.  A deeper embrace of what I call High System, High Soul will help us see that the ways in which we live, work and play are not discrete activities, but a complex weave or tapestry.  It will also help us reclaim the responsibilities of the mind that is not separate from nature, but is nature.  It will, to put it bluntly, help us make sense of sustainability.

At a time when many government agencies and businesses still struggle with the business case for sustainability and/or find they have stalled after making some early gains in “eco-efficiency”, greenhouse gas emissions reductions, or some other well-intentioned but ultimately narrow initiative, it seems clear that a bold new vision is needed to break the deadlock we see across North America and throughout the world – in business, all levels of government and civil society with respect to sustainability. While “going green” or becoming less bad is a necessary and desirable step, it is just that – a step on a journey.  The journey is what matters – an interconnected series of steps that holds the promise of securing our future through new forms of social engagement and interaction, new ways of learning, and new ideas with respect to prosperity.  We must learn to see the world with new eyes, and in doing so, hold the larger system and all of its interconnections such that we can chart a new path for government, business and society that brings us back into right relationship with the Earth and with each other.

In 1956, the original version of The Price Is Right debuted on American television.  It was an immediate hit in the post-war consumer society, and remains popular today, some 56 years later.  The essence of the show involves contestants bidding on expensive products, much in the manner of auctions.  The contestant whose bid is closest to the correct price of the prize – without going over it – wins the prize.  It’s an entertaining enough conceit, I suppose, and there’s no denying the potency of that name, The Price is Right, which is why I deliberately use it here as a jumping off point to consider a different kind of auction, an auction where I increasingly believe the price – any price – is wrong.

Regular readers of my blog know that I track the first Bluefin Tuna auctions of the year at Tokyo’s Tsukji fish market with a sense of grim inevitability.  Last year, a single tuna sold for 32.49 million yen.  This year, bidders made that number seem paltry; a single 539-pound tuna sold for 56.49 million yen or nearly $736,000.  That’s a shade under $1,250 per pound if you’re counting.  Now, it should be said that the first bluefin auction in January is an important cultural event; a key part of Japan’s New Year’s celebrations, and the country is the world’s biggest consumer of seafood.  It should also be noted that this year’s winning bidder, Kiyoshi Kimura, president of a sushi restaurant chain, reportedly said following the auction that his bid was an attempt to “liven up Japan” in the wake of last year’s devastating tsunami, nuclear plant failure and economic stagnation.  Fair enough.  Still, is there not a larger issue at play?

The human experience on Earth is routinely measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress isn’t what we think it is?  What if progress is actually sowing the seeds of societal collapse?  The anthropologist and writer, Ronald Wright, probed this idea expertly in his book, A Short History Of Progress, and he coined the expression “progress traps” to describe alluring technologies and belief systems that may serve immediate needs, but that ransom the future.  As he put it, the prevailing assumption about human occupation of the planet is that “a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind…that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement”.  Put another way, humanity regularly places a very large bet that the future will be better than the past – and by some measures it is, but by other, slower-burning measures, it isn’t.

Recent research has shown that numerous species went extinct as humans moved across the globe.  Whether in Madagascar, where virtually all of the island’s megafauna were pushed to extinction following the arrival of humans 2000 years ago, or the islands of the Pacific Ocean, where some 2000 species of birds have gone extinct, to more recent times when the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources reliably documented 875 extinctions between 1500 and 2009, the story is the same – humans reliably push other species to extinction.

The bluefin tuna is not officially on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) list of endangered species, but it is considered a “species of concern”.  In the language of NOAA this means the bluefin is a species:

About which NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has some concerns regarding status and threats, but for which insufficient information is available to indicate a need to list the species under the Endangered Species Act.

It is interesting (and sad) that, faced with “insufficient information”, we as a society choose not to err on the side of caution, but instead leave room for continued bluefin fishing.  Then again, maybe it is neither interesting nor surprising.  We have, after all, been here many times before.  If I may return to Ronald Wright, he notes that in the 20th century alone, the human population multiplied by four, while consumption grew by 40.  All the while, the number of people living in abject poverty in 2000 was equal to the entire global population in 1900.  He fairly asks is this is progress:

Is this progress? Can the stock market be trusted to run the world? Or is our consumerist boom the illusory wealth of wastrels blowing an inheritance — by no means only their own? Is the promise of prosperity for six billion the Big Lie of our time?

And so it goes.  A 1998 poll conducted by the American Museum of Natural History found that 70% of 400 biologists polled believe that we are living against the backdrop of a human-induced extinction.  The same percentage agreed that up to 20% of all living populations could become extinct within 30 years – by 2028.  In his book, The Future of Life, the eminent biologist, E.O. Wilson, determined that if the current rate of human disruption of the biosphere continued, one-half of the Earth’s higher life forms would be extinct by 2100.  Peter Raven, past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science reinforces this view, saying:

We have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the 21st century.

Let us return to the bluefin tuna being auctioned off in the Tsukji fish market.  Is this a quaint, or even timeless cultural tradition, or is it something more nuanced and, dare I say it, darker?  On the one hand, those who believe in the market might attest to the fact that what we see on display in the auctions is an efficient allocation of an increasingly scarce resource.  Limited supply means intense demand and the price is bid up – as the market says it must.  On the other hand, the bluefin auction can be viewed as the latest entry in a solemn ledger documenting the destruction of life on Earth.  Regardless of the price bid, when the last bluefin is auctioned, we lose a piece of nature, a piece of ourselves.  This is a dark game we are playing, and we continue to play it at our own peril.  Among other considerations, the bluefin plays a critical role in maintaining the ocean ecosystem as a top predator that keep the populations of lower trophic species in check.  But perhaps we don’t care, or care enough to change our behavior.  After all, modern society, especially in the West, is frequently portrayed as being individualistic, a world in which people prioritize their own or immediate family’s goals above those of the wider community or collective.  It is not yet too late, but the hour is long.  Our willingness and ability to change course, to act differently and save the bluefin will say a good deal about our ability to save ourselves.

Contact Rob Abbott at: rob@abbottstrategies.com and follw him on Twitter: @rma1962

The Avett Brothers, the folk-rock band from Mount Pleasant, North Carolina, has been in heavy rotation on my headphones of late – both for the potency of the music, and the message in the lyrics.  This is especially true of the song, Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise. In the wake of the COP-17 meeting in Durban, and particularly in the assessment that China and India are “winners” coming out of this most recent round of global climate negotiating, I readily identify with the lyric:   

There’s a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light

In the fine print they tell me what’s wrong and what’s right

And it comes in black and it comes in white

And I’m frightened by those that don’t see it

And especially in the mournful cry that:

 And your life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected

For 17 years, representatives from nearly 200 countries have gathered annually under the auspices of the United Nations (UN) to try and craft a solution to one of the most daunting challenges that has ever faced humanity – how to slow the heating of the planet.  Each year, the warnings from the scientific community grow louder, as an increasing body of evidence points to the dangers from the continuing accumulation of human-generated greenhouse gases (GHG) in the Earth’s atmosphere.  Shockingly, global emissions jumped by the largest margin ever in 2010 (see Global Carbon Project) overturning the idea floated by some that the decline in emissions during the recession might continue through the tentative recovery in which we now find ourselves. This GHG jump underscores a long-term trend of inexorably rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change.  Even the International Energy Agency, an industry lobby group, fears that we are within 5 years of a climate “tipping point”. As Al Gore put it in his gloriously eloquent 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Lecture: 

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential.

For Canada, the costs of climate change – by any measure – could indeed be stark.  In September, the National Round Table on the Environment and Economy reported that climate change will trigger wide ranging impacts across Canada, from flooding in low-lying coastal regions and threats to the country’s timber supply, to health problems caused by deteriorating air quality. The financial cost for these impacts was pegged at about $5 billion a year by 2020, climbing to between $21 billion and $43 billion a year by mid-century.  In the worst-case scenario, NRTEE put the cost at $91 billion per year by 2050 – social, cultural and environmental costs would push the figure much higher.  The Canadian situation is, of course, the thinnest edge of a much, much larger wedge. Globally, the costs – those that can be monetized, at least – are frighteningly larger.

Against this dire backdrop, you could be excused for thinking that the COP negotiators were achieving real progress.  And yet, for 17 years the results of the UN climate talks have been modest – at best. John Broder, writing in The New York Times earlier this month, characterized the prevailing feeling at the close of each COP meeting as one of disillusionment and discontent:

Every year they fail to significantly advance their own stated goal of keeping the average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels.

It’s important to put the 2 degrees aspiration in context.  As the researchers at Real Climate remind us:

Even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, a target of 2°C seems almost cavalier.

And so it is that the gridlock ensnaring global climate talks is cause for accelerating concern.  There’s a well-worn story about a 17^th century English sea captain that animates the problem of institutional gridlock beautifully.  I share it here to underscore how little we seem to have learned from our own past as a species.  In 1601, James Lancaster served lemon juice to the crew on one of four ships he was commanding on a trip to India.  Most of the crew on this one ship remained healthy, but on the other three ships, 110 of 278 sailors (40%) died of scurvy by the journey’s midpoint.  Now this was important stuff to 17^th century seafarers because scurvy claimed more lives than anything else, including warfare.  So, you’d think Lancaster’s experiment would ignite revolutionary change.  Not so.  The British Navy didn’t stock citrus fruit on its ships until 1795 – nearly 200 years later.  Louis Roddis, in A Short History of Nautical Medicine, notes that in the 200 years from 1600 to1800 nearly 1,000,000 men died of an easily preventable disease.  “There are in the whole of human history few more notable examples of official indifference and stupidity producing such disastrous consequence to human life."  Despite the magnitude of the problem, and the availability of a simple solution, people were slow to change.

 In many obvious ways, the world in which we live today is indisputably a different place than 17^th century Britain, but in other, subtler ways, it is really not so different.  The analogy is an imperfect one, but think of climate change as our generation’s scurvy. There is abundant evidence of the importance of the issue; the solution – a weaning of our economy and life off fossil fuels – though not easy, is also well known.  Yet we refuse to change.  We get hung up on the differing obligations of developed and developing nations, or the question of who will pay to help emerging economies adapt, or the urgency of rapidly developing and deploying clean energy technology, of the classic policy analysis dilemma of concentrated costs (entrenched industry in the developed world) and diffuse benefits (global society).

I get it; the COP negotiators operate on the principle of consensus, meaning that any nation can hold up progress, much less an agreement.  Such was the case again this year.  The COP-17 meeting closed with a “pledge” to work toward a new global climate treaty, and the establishment of a climate fund to aid developing countries in addressing GHG emissions as their economies modernize. But that is all it is – a pledge – all of the details are still to be defined and negotiated.  No one was ready, or able, to take a clear and firm stand, to articulate a vision or story that cut through the bureaucratic knot, and mobilize collective action.  If I may return to Al Gore’s Nobel Lecture, his observation that too many of the world’s leaders are best described in the words Winston Churchill gave to those who ignored Adolph Hitler seems apt:

They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.

The characterization in some quarters of India and China as “winners” coming out of COP 17 is particularly irksome to me.  Let us all, please, be clear about what is unfolding on our watch.  Climate change is a classic illustration of the tragedy of the commons, a situation in which many individuals or countries, acting in their self-interest, deplete or destroy a shared limited resource – this case, our atmosphere, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.  China and India might realize some short-term economic advantage, but there are no “winners” in this scenario.  There is no business to be done on a dead planet; there is no economy to grow in sterile ground.

At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Verlyn Kilnkenborg wrote a powerful essay for The New York Times on the accelerating extinction of mammals worldwide.  It seems even more right now than when he wrote it – deftly drawing a parallel with the convulsions in global financial markets and the efforts to calm them:

What complicates matters further is a simple lesson we might also draw from the present financial crisis; everything is connected.  No species goes down on its own, not without affecting the larger biological community.  We emerged, as a species, from the very biodiversity we are destroying.  At times it seems as though the human experiment is to see how many species we can do without.  As experiments go, it is morally untenable and will end badly for us.

For much of my life I have lamented the fact that in Canada, and too many other countries, we separate our economic and innovation agenda from our environmental agenda, conveniently ignoring the fact that all wealth ultimately flows from the environment.  The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around. When we put off the systemic changes to energy production, transportation, agriculture and other features of “life” because we fear the drag these changes might have on the economy we are being penny wise and pound-foolish.  These changes are the ultimate investment in humanity’s future. Climate change, as COP-17 once again demonstrated, is not an environmental issue; it is sustainability writ large, politics on a grand canvas, and it requires much more than environmental delegates gathering annually if we are to forge something meaningful, something commensurate with the scale of the challenge before us.  As Nick Robins, an energy and climate change analyst at HSBC put it recently: “There is a fundamental disconnect in having environment ministers negotiating geopolitics and macroeconomics.”

So, how to move forward?  To begin, I believe that we have not yet had a meaningful conversation about community and collective action and how this colors our approach to climate change. As a result, we continue to joust for metaphorical turf in a tiresome and ultimately unwinnable tragedy of the commons.  As a species we are a community that transcends boundaries or borders.  We share (or should share) something in common – an abiding desire to achieve sustainable management of the Earth’s atmosphere.  All of us live in communities of place, past, purpose, perspective, and practice and the quantity, quality, and reach of connection in any of these communities depends on how connected people are in each community and how much connecting each person does with other people in each community.  This is not an abstract concept; I passionately believe that to address global climate change people must be invited into a conversation that firstly optimizes the possibilities of belonging, engagement, and making a difference. Only then can the more tactical and tangible actions be identified.  Can we dare to imagine world leaders engaging in this kind of deep conversation, a conversation that is about nothing less than raising consciousness?  I choose to believe that we can, that we must.  The alternative is to live in a state where, as the title of this essay suggests, the head is full of doubt and we perpetually wait for the promise of something different, something better. 

Contact Rob Abbott at: rob@abbottstrategies.com and follow him on Twitter: @rma1962

George Santayana famously observed: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”.  I’ve thought about those good words during much of the Occupy movement because it seems to me that too many people cannot remember the events that brought us to this moment.  And so it is that the protestors have been criticized for lacking a coherent narrative, and moved out of the spaces that were their metaphorical beachhead.  The forces of the ruling empire want us to believe that the protest movement is in fact not that at all; it is nothing more than a disorganized group of disaffected youth and any pretentions to a movement are misguided.  I think not.  The Occupy movement may well be characterized as an international protest directed at economic and social inequality, but I see it as something more – as a profound meditation on how human society lives, works and plays and how we came to this hinge point of history.  Let me explain.

Interest in and concern for the outcomes of human interaction with the natural world and with each other is not new.  Among other reference points, the earliest recorded story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, commented on the dire social and environmental consequences of forest depletion.  Flashing forward through history, that most vexing of terms, “sustainable”, was first used in Germany in the 18^th century to describe a long-term perspective in forestry.  The emergence of industrial society in Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries sparked debate, especially by the Romantics, who were appalled at the “soulless mechanism” of the new age and the human consequences of industrialization.  Charles Dickens’ portrayal of “Coketown” in his novel, Hard Times, was a stinging indictment of rapidly industrializing England, and John Ruskin went so far as to coin the term “illth” to describe the side effects of the emerging economic system – poverty, pollution, despair, and illness.  In North America, several initiatives at this time, notably the Regional Planning Association of America, expressed concerns about sustainability–even if this precise term was not yet used.  And of course, the muckrakers of the early 1900s did work that is too often forgotten, but that provided an intellectual and moral foundation on which current efforts are built.  I would argue that there is a century-long cord connecting the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, with Ida Tarbell’s groundbreaking work, A History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, and Upton Sinclair’s account of the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, published in 1906.  If we are to truly make sense of the Occupy Movement, we need to remember that it is not the latest jeremiad of the modern environmental or labor movements, nor is it a clever marketing campaign dreamed up by an ad agency.  The fact is, the seeds of the Occupy conversation were sown long ago and unless we remember this, learn from this, and make conscious changes now we will walk ever deeper into the maze and further limit our capacity to find a way out.

In 1909, the North American Conservation Conference resulted in a Declaration of Principles that called for “legislation to preserve and protect wildlife, to prevent soil erosion and water pollution, and generally to manage renewable resources in such a way as to ensure their continued productivity in the future.  Sadly, WWI, the stock market crash and Great Depression, and WWII overwhelmed any consideration of how we might adopt such a forward-looking perspective.  It is only in the post-war economic boom that society remembered the dark shadows at the edge of prosperity.

A reactor fire in 1957 at the Windscale nuclear power plant on the northwest coast of England sounded a cautionary note about human use of the environment and especially the dangers of a technologically advancing civilization.  The fire was shortly followed by evidence of atmospheric contamination in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Denmark.  The nature of the contamination was such that over an area of 500 square kilometers, milk from farms was declared unfit for human consumption. 

TheResources for Tomorrow Conference in 1961 marked the beginning of a meditation on conservation and environmental management that in many respects continues today.  A year later, Rachel Carson would publish Silent Spring and it is important to remember that entrenched interests fought very hard against the message that Ms. Carson delivered.  Nonetheless, the era of environmental protection legislation was being birthed.  Significant examples include The Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Air and Water Acts.  In the early 1970s, the Man and Resources conference provided a platform for discussion of a theme that would permeate environmental discussions in Canada and elsewhere for the next two decades, “integrated resource use”.  In hindsight, this can be viewed as the conversation that prefigured what we now see as the Occupy Movement because it sought to advance a worldview that might achieve “the best possible balance between social and economic demands and ecological implications in the wise use of natural resources”. 

The escape of toxic gas from a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India in 1984 that killed over 6,000 people, and the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer in 1985 were two moments when it seemed as if the world’s ruling class might press “pause” and shift to a different trajectory. An additional, and galvanizing spur in this regard was the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear station, an event that underscored humanity’s interconnections and interdependence.  Following this accident, in an all-too-familiar echo of the Windscale incident 40 years earlier, grass eaten by lambs in Wales, milk drunk by Poles and Yugoslavs, and air breathed by Swedes were all contaminated by radiation.  In the wake of Chernobyl incident, the World Commission on Environment and Development report, Our Common Future, sparked debate about the synergistic relationship between economic development, social justice and environmental protection.  This debate would build to a crescendo at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, at the time the largest-ever gathering of heads of state.  The key trends that coalesced in the run-up to UNCED were:

• Increasing world population, especially in the southern hemisphere, and an associated increase in the demand for goods and services
• Increasing concentration of world population in cities
• Increasing demands on a limited natural resource base, and the resulting pressure to improve resource productivity
• Increasing access to information on the environmental and social costs of development
• Increasing public concerns about the deterioration of the environment, and the ramifications this has for economic and social welfare

How familiar these trends feel some twenty years later.  Our inability to both remember the historical roots of the challenges we face globally, and to take right action, have brought us to this moment, this moment when nearly 3,000 cities worldwide have Occupy protestors gathering in a courageous show of defiance at the rulers who have failed them.  Why should we be surprised?

The historical tour I’ve just summarized is an attempt to both remember and recapture the context that we should hold when we talk about the Occupy movement.  There is something important happening here; on the surface it might seem to be many loosely connected things, but if you listen you can hear a plea for a meaningful conversation about how we raise global consciousness and the capacity to endure and thrive.  You can hear a plea for communities, governments, NGOs, businesses and individual citizens to operate not at the expense of the future, but in favor of the future.  This will require a fundamental change in awareness and consciousness with respect to our relationship with nature, and with each other.  Long-held assumptions, especially in the west, about profit maximization, fiduciary responsibility, the role of government, and the responsibilities of individuals – to cite some of the more prominent examples – must be challenged if we are to truly operate in favor of the future and truly honor what I see as lying at the heart of the Occupy movement.

Contact Rob Abbott at rob@abbottstrategies.com and follow him on twitter: @rma1962  

The Keystone pipeline debate should remind us of the need for a national energy and economic strategy 

For all of the talk about the Keystone XL pipeline, what interests me is the conversation we aren’t having – but should.  While considerable media attention is being given to the jobs versus environment debate, the real conversation is about perspective.  This is the too often overlooked need to stand outside a particular frame of reference and look at conditions from a wider and/or longer context.  The power of perspective is that it can reveal truths that are otherwise hard to see.  This is especially apt in considering the way in which we consistently situate economic development opportunities in the zeitgeist and play these off against other “competing” interests such as environmental, social, cultural or heritage values.  This is the truest frame within which to consider Keystone because in Canada our economic history has been defined by the “staple theory” advanced in the 1930s by Harold Innis, a political economist at the University of Toronto. 

Innis argued that Canada developed as it did because of the nature of its staple commodities – fur, fish, lumber, wheat, and minerals – that were “harvested” and exported to Europe.  The search for and exploitation of these staples led to the creation of institutions that defined the economic and political culture of our country. And it continues today.  In virtually every province and territory the economic development emphasis is on natural resource extraction: British Columbia wants to open eight new mines as part of a latter day “gold rush”, and is championing shale gas development; Alberta is accelerating the pace of oil sands development; Saskatchewan is leading the country in economic growth on the back of its own oil and gas development; and so on. 

TransCanada Pipelines, the Keystone proponent, has spent millions of dollars lobbying in support of the project – constructing a story of secure energy and jobs and minimizing potential environmental risks – and has been enthusiastically joined in this effort by the Government of Canada.  And through it all, the ghost of Innis haunts the narrative: export of raw materials – in this case, heavy oil from Alberta – can trigger economic growth.  The problem is that this is a relatively short-term proposition; Keystone might protect or create jobs and revenue for Alberta and the federal government, but is this really sustainable?  What happens when the oil runs out?  A passing glance at our own history shows that apparently sustainable industries like cod on the east coast, fur in Central Canada, and forests on the west coast, can be all too readily extinguished.  Why?  In the absence of a long-term perspective, and a commitment to both technical and social process innovation, governments routinely find themselves backed into a corner as resource stocks decline and default to job protection at the expense of other interests.  The rewards are always short-lived; the day of reckoning arrives when the resource is depleted, and after the handwringing, we fail to learn from these mistakes of policy or management and move on to the next “resource” that might fuel economic growth.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  We can do better and we must do better.      

And so it is that I wonder about the broader narrative within which Keystone should be situated.  I am under no illusions; our economy today is largely based on fossil fuels, minerals and oil.  I therefore expect the project to go ahead, but what of our economy and cultural identity in the future?  It seems to me that if Keystone proceeds, it should do so as one component of an overarching energy and economic development strategy that is truly sustainable – and not as a discrete project viewed in isolation at a moment in time.  And the same is true for all of those other resource projects waiting in provincial and federal queues.

For too long we have defined ourselves as a nation that exploited natural resources.  Must that trend be our destiny?  I don’t think so.  I envision a 40-to-50 year transition that sees our relationship to energy, the environment, and our economy evolve such that we become known as much for what we leave in the ground as what we take out.  Our legacy of natural resource extraction can be just that – a legacy that serves as the foundation on which we build a bold “next act” for Canada.  Keystone and projects like it have a place in this narrative, but they do not define it; a portion of the royalties paid and profits earned from these projects should be reinvested in a bold innovation agenda for Canada that includes targeted investments in communication, education and infrastructure.  The future comes knocking and unless we make conscious choices and investments to prepare for that future we will relive the mistakes of our past.  The export of oil and gas looks good today, but it is really not so very different from the export of fish, fur or forests.  So while we quite rightly examine the specific merits of Keystone, we need an equal measure of attention on the intellectual and public policy space within which Keystone properly fits.  What might a truly diverse national energy portfolio for Canada look like, and how do we get there?  What are the implications and opportunities for new forms of economic opportunity associated with a changing energy mix?   

Canada has abundant natural capital assets, but it does not have an infinite supply.  The oil and gas will run out.  And when it does, our reliance on commodity exports will constitute the ultimate economic development trap.  The work to avoid such a trap should start now.  We do not think on a national scale about assets and capabilities in the same way that we think of individual provinces’ assets and capabilities.  As a result, any pretense of Canada having a national energy strategy is more properly viewed as a national oil and gas strategy, which both limits the conversation now, and heightens our national vulnerability to future energy and economic shocks when the oil and gas game has played itself out or moved elsewhere.  It’s time to express energy and ecological worry as economic and social opportunity and paint a picture of how this might be achieved over the next 40-50 years.  This is about looking at energy in a new and bolder perspective.  This is the conversation we aren’t having.

Ray’s achievements with Interface are justifiably lauded, but it was his willingness, and his ability, to see far beyond his own company’s interests and share his wisdom – with competitors and others – that speaks to the kind of person he was, the kind of leader he was.  Ray understood that sustainability is an attempt to bridge the gap that too often separates environmentalists and economists; planners and developers.  Done well, as Ray did with Interface, it was a wonderful demonstration that sustainability and business strategy are not mutually exclusive.  In particular, Ray was extraordinarily nimble in his response to the "economy versus the environment" debate.  We all know the tired refrain: investment in the environment drains valuable money from the bottom line.  Ray knew better, but he also understood where many of his contemporaries were coming from.  He knew that any entrenched system is resistant to change, especially in the absence of a compelling argument for change.  And so he became the argument for change.  He deftly, elegantly brought the force of his big brain and considerable southern charm to bear on the idea that sustainability is much more than a higher, faster brand of environmentalism with little to contribute to business and societal success.  He opened the Interface playbook and showed anyone who was willing to look how it could be done – and done profitably.  He demonstrated that sustainability can both protect existing assets and value and provide the basis for new wealth creation.  Ray could do this because he genuinely saw sustainability not as a problem to be solved, but as a future to be created.  He saw it as a pragmatic response to business and organizational realities that are cast into sharp relief by planning and risk management that deliberately looks beyond the horizon of the next quarter or the next year.  This is the lens that Ray (with a nudge, it must be acknowledged, from Paul Hawken) brought to INterface, and it is the same perspective that has been nurtured by Dam Hendrix, his successor as CEO.

What I remember, and cherish most in thinking of Ray is his protean capacity as a storyteller.  Drew Weston, a professor of psychology at Emory University, has said that the "stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred".  When Ray talked of "taking nothing from the earth that is not rapidly and naturally renewable, and doing no harm to the biosphere", he framed it as an expedition, a climb to the top of Mount Sustainability.  And in doing so he both declared the values he held sacred, and provided context for the thinking and deep conversation that can guide any organization toward choices that are not irreversible and that enhance, rather than hinder resilience in the face of change.  This is not ideological; it is simply smart.

In an article earlier this year commemorating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Ray managed, in just a few words, to distill a lifetime of living and learning, a life in business, and a profound engagement in the cause of sustainability.  It is a worthy capstone to his life and work.  He said:

 There is no alternative to protecting nature if we want air, water, soil creation (and thus food), materials, energy, climate regulation, the carbon cycle (including photosynthesis), pollination, seed dispersal, flood and insect control.   Take away any of those and there would be very little economy left.

We all stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us.  Ray Anderson’s words and example have inspired me over the past two decades – and they inspire me still.  We will miss him, but his legacy lives on.  And he will never be forgotten.

Contact Rob Abbott at: rob.abbott@shaw.ca

The City of Vancouver, flanked by Metro and several individual municipal champions, is currently engaged in an important and demonstrably successful experiment in social transformation through its efforts to become the "greenest city" in the world by 2020.

Frankly, the world needs a champion city, a living laboratory, in which leading green urban practices are developed, studies and promoted.  A city in which the persistent debate pitting economic growth against environmental protection is, at last, put to rest.  Vancouver can be that city, and green, in the widest sense, can become its brand.

There are a lot of "Vancouver-watchers" out there, keen to monitor the Vancouver experiment because it contains ideas and lessons that could shape the trajectory of cities across the globe – not only or even principally about green-tech innovation and accomplishment (though Vancouver is no slouch in that regard), but broader social and process innovation, featuring important origination and achievement in:

• Genuine strategy incubation and creation – and a high skill in the art of "connecting-the-dots" leading to changes in policy and urban practice.
• Shifts in political, policy and administrative culture.
• Relevant public conversation and media discourse – the creation of a civic "space" in which citizens and stakeholders are genuinely invited into a dialogue about the shape and trajectory of their city.
• Industry practices.
• Community values and design.
• Academic excellence and successful collaboration with business, NGO and government sectors.
• Construction technology, infrastructure, energy auditing, architecture, and urban design.
• Gradual but steady transformation of business resistance into business embrace of green values and practices.
• Wide recognition of bio-regional values – a spreading ecological "literacy" and culture.

These are significant and largely incalculable made-in-Vancouver assets – but they are assets nonetheless, and the sooner the city prepares itself to strategically capitalize on them, the greater the net benefit to the city, its citizens and its partners.

Quietly, and not so quietly, Vancouver has developed a global reputation as an important urban laboratory.  So-called "Vancouverism" – the art and science of urban planning pioneered by former City Planning Director Larry Beasley and others – has rightly been studied (and expropriated and imitated) everywhere.  Less noticed is that Vancouverism has spawned a significant sub-economy as architects, politicians, urban planners, developers, journalists, academics, consultants, building professionals, and cultural creatives have made the intellectual pilgrimage to Vancouver (and collectively dropped millions of dollars into the city’s economy) to see, study, learn about and otherwise experience the city’s practices.  Vancouver’s professionals associated with the process have also marketed their talent and expertise, and generated a sizable export economy based on these unique-to-Vancouver urban design products and practices (policy-creation, planning strategies, architecture, design, marketing expertise, and so on).

We are suggesting here that Vancouver’s current experiments and achievements with city-wide sustainability innovation dramatically extend and give a new bounce to the arc of Vancouverism.  This second act of Vancouverism is gold right under the city’s feet.  The ever-expending pool of expertise in Vancouver is enormous and it operates in all disciplines and frameworks at the community, NGO, urban policy, urban political administration and leadership, consulting, academic and enterprise/business levels.  Moreover, the ripples of this collective expertise are felt in all corners of the globe.  That this has happened without any conscious organizing framework or strategy is something of a miracle, but it is our view that without such an intentional effort now, the real opportunity for Vancouver might be lost.

That is, it is crucial for businesses of all stripes and economic development leadership to recognize that the city/regional urban sustainability accomplishment – apart from its intrinsic virtues – is a brand, and an extraordinary Vancouver economic development opportunity, and needs to be seen as such.  It is analogous to Silicon Valley and other cities or city-regions that have woken up to their strengths and local excellence, and moved consciously to exploit them.

Viewed in this light, Vancouver’s whole-city innovation is an expression of the ideas Richard Florida has popularized in recent years, and is also wholly consistent with the argument about how city economies work mounted so persuasively by Jane Jacobs and others many years ago.  Put another way, the unfolding experiment in Vancouver is indeed a green one, but it is too often and too narrowly defined as an environmental one.  Fact is, this green is all about the color of money and opportunity in the 21st century, and the transforming power of an idea whose time is coming – and fast.

As a center for green-tech innovation (energy, construction, waste management and so on), Vancouver will always find itself in competition with other places that may have their own strategic advantages.  But as a green urban culture, and as a place that is the or one of the leading social innovators successfully moving an entire urban population in all of its parts toward green urbanism ("one planet living"), Vancouver is unequalled and has extraordinary strategic advantages.

Economic and other key leadership in Vancouver needs to immediately consider these matters at the deepest level, and aggressively begin framing the city’s future in this context.  Such work might begin with objective study of Vancouver’s sustainability accomplishments and assets, and its potential to become North America’s "Green Capital", leading to a detailed long-range strategy and "play book" to maximize the potential benefits to the city.  Such an undertaking can explore:

• Creation of an informal or formal secretariat drawn from the entirety of the Vancouver economic fabric – it is important not to frame this as a conversation among and between a narrow green constituency.  This is about the entire economy – as it is now, and as it may become in the future.  As such, it needs the input of long-term economic players every bit as much as the new kids working in alternative energy, local food, digital media and so on.
• An external communications and networking plan to promote Vancouver accomplishments and forge partnerships or alliances with like-minded cities globally.
• Information-gathering and coordination of human assets.
• Strategies – financial and promotional – to assist all green initiatives.
• Business facilitation and opportunity-brokering.
• Any and all other activity designed to maximize the "halo effect" of Vancouver’s urban innovation success.

This opportunity won’t wait forever, and other cities are or soon will be poised to exploit their particular reputational advantages and benefits.  Consequently, no better moment exists for Vancouver to capitalize on the multiplier value of its green assets and initiatives.  And so we return to the important idea of perspective.  The current city aspiration around "green" needs to be re-framed or re-calibrated to emphasize a green economic development strategy.  In other words, we need to infuse the entire economy with the ideas and ideals of green, broadly defined.

Written jointly by Rob Abbott and Gene Miller.

Contact Rob at: rob.abbott@shaw.ca

Contact Gene at: gene@gaininggroundsummit.com