Reflections on Whistler, The Natural Step, and Sustainability

I recently participated in a 3-day Natural Step strategic sustainability planning workshopheld in Whistler, British Columbia. The workshop and location combined to illuminate both leading edge progress and the challenge ahead. We were fortunate to have such an exceptional model of abundant nature and village-level sustainability at our doorsteps. My personal-professional reflections on the workshop and the state of the sustainability challenge and opportunities follow.

Abundant Nature Beckons

Because the sun did not set until 9:30pm, nature beckoned and everyone in Whistler seemed to be out and about for another 4+ hours after work in 80 degree, shorts-and-T-shirt weather! What a treat to be able to step out one's door onto trails that lead to nearby forests, meadows, lakes, high and wild peaks and glaciers, and even human made recreational parks (skateboard, bike, skiing/biking). Everyone seemed to be in motion, at least walking, running, sometimes swimming and fishing, but more often than not speeding around on wheels (bikes, skateboards, roller blades, or scooters). Nature appeared abundant and unlimited. Everyone was doing something! (Photos of the trip begin with an airplane shot of Mt. Rainier, Vancouver airport, the bus trip to Vancouver--a leading example of emerging sustainable urbanism--then on to Whistler, the workshop, the village, and surrounding area.)

The Paradox and Challenge of Local Sustainability Success - Still Connected to an Unsustainable System

Whistler's commitment and journey towards sustainability (see Whistler 2020, one of the poster-child successes of Canada's federally-required Integrated Community Sustainability Plans) was evident in many ways: its pedestrian oriented and active village; its aesthetically designed parks, pedestrian/ bike pathways, green buildings, green roofs; and it's biologically based utility services, recycling, connections to local agriculture, and green business and hotel management. Whistler's sustainability value even permeated the culture, with employees assertively assisting customer recycling when the myriad of bin choices appeared perplexing. Of course, the contradictions of the modern world were evident in high-end retail, consumption, other economic activity, and oddly located litter (Starbucks cups sitting on top of fences off nature trails!). As far as Whistler has taken sustainability, it remains, as we all do, connected to the larger economy that still uses tools, materials, and methods that systematically and increasingly degrade the biosphere's regenerative capacity and, unwittingly, that of the human economy too. Our economy is also still dependent on natural resource use that is reaching the limits of global supply, and simultaneously, ironically, and paradoxically reducing the capacity of nature to reproduce those resources. Recently, the local effects of global warming eliminated the winter freeze in some temperate forests of British Columbia, thereby allowing pine beetles to survive the winter and amplify their devastation year round of thousands of acres of prime forests.

The No-Change, Business-As-Usual, False Prosperity Scenario

These contradictions of modern life were a useful real-world backdrop for the workshop. They illuminated the false-prosperity face and essence of our present "business and society as usual" trajectory along with the obvious next steps on Whistler's and society's journey to sustainability. The key ingrediant for a successful journey is strategically inspiring and guiding on-going ecologic-economic innovation. Such innovation will transfrom our economy's systematic and accelerating destruction of nature into the systematic and accelerating restoration of nature (and of equal importance, the human economy too). Although appearing to be an added cost and drag on the economy, this "restore nature" scenario and business model is actually the highest profit path of current choices facing business and society (among many treatise on this point--the benefits of strong and early action to jump start this scenario far outweigh the economic costs of not acting--see The Way Out, the Stern Report, NCI's business cases, and links listed in the next paragraph).

Sustainability as an Innovation Platform and Profit Path for Creating a Regenerative Economy & Society

Sustainability, when understood accurately, is the most creative (possibly only) innovation platform for a profit path to a sustainable society in the biosphere and its attendant potential for perpetual prosperity and societal well being. Instead of our economy systematically undermining the very cycles of nature that create nature's power and regenerative life-supporting and regenerating wealth, the human economy merges with, restores, and enhances those infinite cycles at levels of material productivity that also will be able to create in 40 short years, thriving, vibrant human communities for our stabilized 2050 global population of 9-11 billion mostly new "earth citizens." Even if unattainable in this time frame, it is important to begin with this ultimate goal in mind in order to generate the required degree of creativity; illuminate the required resources and moves; elicit the required level of effort; motivate and sustain the work; correctly value the options, priorities, trade-offs, and opportunity costs; and to drive the intensity of effort required for success if it is possible. Use of any other goal becomes a self-fulfilling failure prophecy. As a popular quote says, "The best way to forecast the future is to create it."

The False Choice Muddle of Unsustainability

However, becoming a sustainable society in the biosphere is a creative, market-making, society-making act, not an incremental economic adjustment to the relative valuations of different resource inputs, regardless of whether prices accurately reflect real resource costs and opportunities (which they do not presently). As such, it is a strategic decision, a leadership decision, and one needing collective validation and attention in a democratic society. The choice of sustainability is not simply a marginal choice between widget A and B based principally on price differences between otherwise similar scenarios. Thus, the free-market mechanism for marginal resource allocation is the wrong mechanism and wrong calculus to use in making society's decision over sustainability or unsustainability. The choice is fundamentally between a sustainable society in the biosphere instead of the likely catastrophe of species suicide under the false prosperity scenario of business and society as usual. Although the path of unsustainability may be cheaper given it's much shorter duration and under its false and undervalued market prices, it is unaffordable and unacceptable. Who would choose it for oneself, one's family, one's community, one's firm, or humanity and the planet as a whole? So why are we muddling around with an apparent choice which is a false choice. There is only one option, and if we want to achieve it, we better accelerate, coordinate, and scale-up the effort.

The Difficulty - Magnitude of Challenge Far Beyond Our Experience but not Capacity

The sustainability challenge is really global society's choice for regenerative success for all or the default of inaction, the degenerative demise for most and likely all. The difficulty is that the challenge is at a level of complexity and scope beyond which society has ever acted; it is beyond the capacity of any of its current institutions. As such, making it is itself a moment in the innovation challenge of sustainability to human society to rise to the occasion and requirements of creating its own perpetual success on earth and in the universe. It is a challenge to invent the institutional mechanism and social situation in which and with which to make this decision and undertake the required massive program of on-going innovation.

We Have the Tools and Experience to Begin the Bid for Sustainability Success

No wonder this new concept, experience, and challenge of sustainable development engenders so much confusion for us. Fortunately, we have the tools and experience to begin a successful bid. The strategic decision and requisite planning can be informed by extending and up-scaling the experience and dialogue of discovery and learning that the smartest companies and communities on the planet have been pursuing since the early 1990s (see Natural Capitalism (also RMI's summary), and Natural Capital Solutions) and The Necessary Revolution). This innovation has been often framed in the strategic sustainability approach and process of The Natural Step's(TNS, story) Framework for Strategic Sustainability (FSSD) and it's ABCD strategic sustainability action planning method since 1990. Key threads have been the process of creating learning organizations of Peter Senge and the International Society for Organizational Learning, biomimicry and cradle to cradle processes, the strategic imperatives of Natural Capitalism, and the various threads informing them. All of these threads have been informed by the wider currents of an ecosystems and whole systems approach to problem resolving and management that has been evolving since the mid-20th century. One key grandfather of a sustainability approach was Buckminster Fuller (and his peers, such as John Todd, and others working next-of-kin arenas, such as Ian McHarg and Sym Van der Ryn (also)), with his comprehensive anticipatory design science and world gameof doing ever more with ever less for the maximum advantage of all humanity based on leveraging an understanding of nature's dynamics as human society mimicked the design brilliance, efficiencies, and cycles of nature's ever transforming dynamic and regenerative life support system.

Accelerating the Response with a Strategic Approach

Although there are policy implications and requirements for ultimate success, much initial progress can be made simply by existing firms and households embracing a strategic sustainability approach and pushing it as far as their capacity and our current policy, legal, market, and technological context allows over time. The key components of a strategic sustainability approach are as follows:

(1) a basic understanding of how the how nature's regenerative life support system functions (sustainability) and how human society systematically undermines those functions (unsustainability).

(2) understanding the minimum set of three ecological conditions required for nature's sustainability; and understanding the one minimum condition for a thriving, regenerative social system or society, and then understanding how society can undermine those conditions to create a trajectory of unsustainability that culminates eventually in severe biospheric and concomitant social system degradation or collapse from which recovery is not possible (there would be few if any left to recover and no supportive context within which to recover).

(3) using those conditions as principles for eliminating the firm's or household's contributions to natural and social system unsustainability.

(4) eliminating those effects (not simply reducing impacts) through innovation that increases productivity to reduce impacts, or substitutes other materials, processes, or tools that do not contribute to unsustainability; when eliminating use of materials or processes that have negative impacts is not possible, then keeping the sources of unsustainability insulated from the biosphere in eternally cycling, closed-loop human processes.

(5) creating an initial strategic action plan to begin moving towards sustainability by creating a compelling shared vision of organizational or household success, understanding how attaining it will violate sustainability principles, understanding how current reality violates the sustainability principles, understanding those current practices and resources that contribute to sustainability and can be used in the transition, and then backcasting from the principles of sustainability success the set of actions required to achieve the desired future goals while eliminating current contributions to sustainability and avoiding future ones.

(6) creating an implementation plan to complete actions and goals of phase 1, learn from and celebrate the experience, formulate the powerful bold moves of phase 2, and continue the strategic planning and innovation process to the point of ultimate success.

Sustainability is Not an Option and Will Create a Pretty Good Society Too - Key Tasks for Each of Us

This socio-ecological-economic sustainability transformation is a requirement for human survival, not an option. Fortunately, it is not only a requirement for survival, but a recipe for a thriving, vibrant society too. Nature is a complex, regenerative life support system (i.e., economy) that provides critical,  irreplaceable, and largely "free" economic resources and processes to the human economy. This transformation will ultimately enhance and expand nature's regenerative capacity while simultaneously increasing durable human economic productivity and prosperity. In turn, this transformation will produce community security and well being. The key tasks of this socio-ecological-economic innovation program where there is a role to play for all actors, from the individual, to family, to firm, to government, and beyond, are as follows:

(1) radically and quickly increasing resource and energy productivity;

(2) shifting to (i) renewable energy, (ii) use of non-toxic materials abundant in nature, and (iii) biological production methods, materials, and processes for greater prosperity;

(3) insulating nature from toxic and persistent human materials through use of closed-loop manufacturing and redesigned and reengineered "cradle-to-cradle" product and material cycles where waste is eliminated;

(4) stopping the destruction of nature (natural capital);

(5) investing in (replace/expand) the capital of nature, i.e., natural capital, that exquisite biological infrastructure and processes that produces key inputs to the human economy for which there are no substitutes; and

(6) eliminating barriers to people meeting their universal needs as the basis for establishing an economy and society where social equity and participation create and support a fully inclusive and thriving global human society for the first time in history.

(A few key seminal resources are as follows: Sustainable Value Framework,  Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development--FSSD, Natural Capitalism, The Necessary Revolution, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Whole Systems Design & Engineering, and RMI's Reinventing Fire Initiative).

The Time Challenge - Urgency

The only real question remaining is whether we will arrive quickly enough to avoid the "inconvenient effects" of a destabilizing and possibly collapsing biosphere as current trends accelerate over the next 10+ years and mature in mid century. Such effects would have a corresponding impact on the human economy and society. Hopefully, the jury is still out on the ultimate consequences of the cumulative effect to date on the human economy; but the good news is that we have everything we need for success if we accelerate current initiatives, and especially if we add a strategic dimension and approach.

The task facing individuals, firms, and communities is threefold:

(1) to educate ourselves about the sustainability challenge and its new opportunities,

(2) to acquire the skills and capacities to respond effectively and innovate powerfully; and

(3) then change what we do in our lives and work one profitable step at a time for the added benefit of increased security and prosperity.

On occasion, we may be able to take two or more steps at a time when the opportunity arises, or even take the big, bold leaps to new opportunities presented by whole-systems solutions and disruptive technological change! By joining larger initiatives in our community, industry, and society; by voting and other acts of responsible and path-blazing sustainability citizenship and entrepreneurship; and by bold, inspiring sustainability leadership rooted in the value added of a sustainability approach, we can accelerate and amplify society’s transition to a durable and highly prosperous future.

Regardless of Belief - the Playbook for Success is the Same - Sustainability: Let's Go!

Hopefully we will arrive at a local-global condition of a sustainable society in the biophere in time to avoid biospheric systems destabilization and collapse. However, the playbook for the most profitable path ahead is the same regardless of goal (profitable or sustainable firm), ultimate outcome (sustainability or systems crash), or personal beliefs about sustainability and climate change (that they are real or not); so let's get on with creating the most prosperous and sustainable society in the bioshphere in human history at lightening-fast speed with a globally collaborative, path-blazing program of ecological-economic innovation.

[Share your thoughts in comments below or with me; review S2030’s resources, join S2030’s email list, become a member, expand your understanding and contribution, let S2030 know what you need on your journey that you cannot find here or elsewhere.]