Sustainability in 60 Minutes: The Winner

You may recall that a few weeks ago, I passed along a query sent to me by a professor at a college in the Northeast U.S.:

I am teaching a college course this semester on Sustainable Science and Technology and was wondering if you had any suggestions for a one-hour activity that would engage students to learn and possibly apply some of the fundamentals of sustainability.

I offered up a free subscription to The Green Business Letter to whomever could come up with the best response.

Thanks to all of you who responded. The suggestions ranged from the rather simplistic . . .

Why don't you use the classic definition, which introduced the concept into our world? I think it suffices in depth and scope. Namely the definition used in the famous Brundtland Report (1987) which defines sustainability as "Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs."

. . . to the decidedly complex (and occasionally obtuse).

Which makes perfect sense. Sustainability is a rather simple concept -- I like to describe it as an Intergenerational Golden Rule -- that can be quite complicated to communicate. How do you covey the notion of a world in which we can celebrate abundance . . . forever? And do it in a way so that people get a systemic view of it all -- the interconnectedness of people with the natural world, across borders, cultures, and generations?

To be frank, I'm not sure that any of the entrants to my little competition achieved that lofty goal. But there were some worthy efforts. Several fell in the category of "life-cycle thinking." That is: You can convey the fundamentals of sustainability if you can help people understand and appreciate the total environmental impacts of everyday things -- where they come from, how they are made and brought to market, how they are used by the people who buy them, and what happens to them when they are no longer wanted or needed.

So, for example, Eric Corey Freed, a.k.a. the Organic Architect, offered up this exercise, which he says he uses with his students in Sustainable Design 101 at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. Says Eric:

1. Pick 10 common materials and walk the students through the lifecycle of each, asking: a. where does it come from? b. what are the by-products of it's production? c. how is it delivered/installed/maintained? d. how healthy is it? e. what do we do with it when we are done with it?

OR

2. Have the students map their lives and include ALL of the inputs and outputs (this is food, waste, air, carbon dioxide, etc.). Then ask them to take RESPONSIBILITY for what goes in and what goes out. How do you manage the damaging outputs?

There were several contributors with lesson plans along these lines.

But my vote -- and the Green Business Letter subscription -- goes to Vinay Gupta, a self-described "eccentric thinker with a strong interest almost everything" who is working on a design "for a new series of very efficient microbuildings called Hexayurts which make 100% efficient use of sheet goods."

Here's Vinay's contribution:

I'd start with Easter Island - the clear example of a civilization, capable of creating complex artifacts, which collapses entirely because they neglected their limits and went right ahead and drove their trees to local extinction.

Really ram that one home. No trees means no wood, no fertility, barren, windswept waste. For these (picture of stone faces).

Then whip out some charts showing global biodiversity decline. Stay away from topics like Global Warming where there is *any* possible room for weaseling, and stick to what's charted without possibility of doubt.

Picture: Easter Island on one hand, Planet Earth on the other.

"Now, the timescales are a little longer, and the unknown are greater, but do you see the cause for concern? We may make the whole Earth into one great Easter Island within a couple of generations. Impossible?"

Picture: of American Suburban Home, two or three cars parked outside. In the front lawn, an Easter Island-style Stone Face.

"Perhaps not. The fact there is a risk is enough reason for our society to change course to avoid it."

"Now, let's talk about sustainability."

Switch focus to GDP vs. Energy/Resource Intensity: "we are actually doing more and more -- making more wealth, more stuff -- with less energy, less raw material."

Introduce the notion of sustainable harvest - what the earth can continue to generate indefinitely without degrading future productivity.

Graph into the future: GDP vs. Energy/Resource intensity, eventually crossing the line where the GDP is generated within the "Sustainable Harvest" numbers. This is obviously going to be a "Wild Ass Guess" chart, but the goal is to communicate "This is sustainability -- where the entire environmental impact of the Human Race falls below the Sustainable Harvest thresholds of the earth."

Now, at that point, give the kids a breather. Shellshock is not an improbable reaction to thinking on this scale, but without it, environmentalism is a meaningless optimization: reducing CO2 by 20% means nothing, at all, outside of the context of a *goal* which is zero emissions -- it has to be progress towards a climate-neutral state to be meaningful. Without a goal, it's just arbitrary action to sooth the conscience of the world, rather than fixing the problem, which is that we are destroying our ecological support structures.

So, give 'em a break. Play some Mahler or some Nirvana, hit the mental reset switches.

Then spend 20 minutes talking about success stories: hybrid car adoption, wind power and the like. Let them walk out with the feeling that there is good money to be made solving the problem.

Topics not to touch: India, China and growth of consumption in the developing world, toxic waste accumulation, etc. Just ... let it slide.

Those who are interested either know already or will find out soon enough. Those who aren't should walk away with one thing in their head: the GDP vs. Resource Intensity curve, and the idea that progress down that curve can be accelerated, at a profit, by intelligent business decision making. If *EVERYBODY* in that class walks out with the idea that "resource efficient business process are profitable and good for the planet," that's a success. Let the few motivated ones dig down to the next level, but get that basic message into every head.

I like this approach for a number of reasons. For starters, it looks at sustainability from a societal, even a planetary, perspective, without seeming abstract -- as opposed to looking at it from the standpoint of products or other "things." It also takes note of the fact that a lot of this stuff is just too damn complicated (global warming) or depressing (toxic waste accumulation) or overwhelming (the potential impacts of China or India) to deal with -- and, as a result, may not be worth touching on in this hourlong class. And I love the Mahler/Nirvana break to allow for some midcourse recovery time -- music to my ears!

Vinay's approach is also uplifting, which I think is critical. It communicates the notion that we can do better, and that profitable, resource-efficient businesses can lead the way. It leaves students with hope, maybe even excitement -- We can DO this!

And that may be the most important lesson of all.

Comments

[Vinay Gupta]

One thing I notice on re-reading this is that I didn't make a critical point clear. Here it is:

"Sustainability is a natural result of current trends towards resource and energy efficient business processes. This means that *eventually* we will reach sustainabiilty through greater efficiency."

That's important. *IF* we survive is a provisio which may or may not need to be stressed, but the idea that in 2600AD, we'll have such efficient devices that umpteen-billion human beings can share the rock without straining the planet's resources is important. It means that we're negociating a difficult adolescence, rather than staring death in the face. We can take pride in the idea of getting to sustainability faster, rather than poindering if is possible at all.

It's all about that GDP per Unit of Environmetal Impact number. It keeps falling and falling and falling as our energy and resource intensity falls...

We're going to be fine.

[Vinay Gupta]

And, thank you so much for the subscription to the GBL. So much content per issue!

I really like this small-challenge type stuff - I wonder if it would be worth posting all the other ideas somewhere (a wiki?) so that people could see them together and pick bits from one and another to improve them?

[Erzebet Bathroy]

You seem to have confused advocacy with explanation. What is described is not an explanation of sustainability but an indoctrination to an ideology.

Indeed, one of the key linchpins is a Green version of Pascal's Wager.

If that is what lies behind sustainability, then it is indeed as bankrupt as the nay sayers claim it is.

[Hank Woollard]

I'd like to add a definition we used with Martin County, Florida's Sustainability Demonstration Project. Sustainability is:

The ability of the current generation to meet its needs, without compromising the abiliity of future generations to meet theirs.

[Gil Friend]

I don't know what Pascal's Wager was, but I want to quibble with your selection, Joel. It's a great _lecture_, but I read your request as looking for something more: "a one-hour activity that would engage students to learn and possibly apply some of the fundamentals of sustainability." I'm not sure it's presentation of facts that makes that difference. The more experiential approaches of the "where does it come from, where does it go" will, in my experience, do more to shift thinking and action.

My personal favorite (no prize, please; I missed the deadline fair and square :-): the "spaceship" exercize we often use in Natural Step workshops.

First people brainstorm a list of things to take on a 3-day jaunt around the moon; easy and fun. Then the brainstorm a list of things to take on a 100-year spaceflight. Every single group winds up constructing something like a sustainable ecosystem within the spaceship, and every group realizes they've described the conditions of satisfaction for sustainable ecosystems here on earth.

(The most striking case: employees of a major chemical company who realized, to their surprise, that the shopping list included absolutely nothing that their company made -- which led to a bit of soul-searching about "what business are we really in.")

[jeff stevens]

I think the "inputs and outputs" exercise is the best able to communicate the concept in relation to how we live (to quite different levels of sustainability). In an MLA program I went through they had us map inputs and outputs from our house and in a separate exercise see how in nature there is no such thing as waste. Getting our inputs and outputs closer to that of the nature model becomes the goal and it becomes very clear that natural processes are sustainable and our inputs and outputs need to be altered dramatically in order to be even just a little more sustainable.

[Aaron Vallejo]

Sustaining not Sustainability.

Creating a sustaining world requires we respect economy, equity and ecology using the Triple Top Line of business strategy. Where we eliminate the concept of waste. This is healthy, circular industrial production powered by the sun. This is Cradle to Cradle Design.

Google "Reversing Global Warming"

[Paul Fowler]

The New York Times has a button you can click that says PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION.
Your article is great, but I need a little larger print, and, the entire page should be used and not so narrow. Can you help with this?

[Nancy Staus]

I teach an introductory biology course for non majors at a community college in Oregon, and last quarter I did a lecture/lab on sustainability and human impact on the planet. It took us about 2 hours but the exercise could be shortened if necessary. I found the easiest way to discuss sustainability was in the context of ecological footprints--how much land area does it take to sustain a certain lifestyle and how much area is there on the earth? We started by discussing the Biosphere 2 experiment and deciding what should be included in a biosphere to sustain 8 human lives indefinitely. I told them the area of the Biosphere was 3.2 acres which translates to .4 acre/person. I then had them all calculate a simple ecological footprint using a formula available at http://www.mec.ca/Apps/ecoCalc/ecoCalc.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=619029

Most of my students had footprints greater than 10 acres! So we figured out whether this footprint was sustainable given the current world's population and total area of productive land on the planet. Given the earth's 22 billion acres of productive land and its 6 billion human inhabitants, the average ecological footprint should be about 3.7 acres per person if we assume that land use should be distributed equitably. Thus footprints greater than 3.7 acres (i.e. all of my students) are not sustainable if everyone is to have equal amounts of land. My students were quite shocked at the results and it really gave them a concrete way of visualizing sustainability that cannot be communicated solely by lecturing about GDP, Energy/Resource intensity and other vague concepts that are basically meaningless to the average 20-something. Also, they were fascinated by Biosphere 2 (which many of them had never heard of!!) and some of them did their own out-of-class research on it (unheard of in most community college classes) to learn more.