Sustainabilty Success Requires a Win-Win Understanding

Sustainability can only be the solution, the antidote to our current economy’s interlinked and multiplying ecologic-economic crises, if people understand that sustainability is about creating a “win-win” solution -- an environmentally regenerative or “friendly” global economy that is more powerful, secure, and prosperous than our current fossil fuel-based economy ever could be, and doing so within the few short years remaining for an effective response before accelerating trends foreclose the opportunity.  This is a critically important point because so much of the policy proposals and media nattering about sustainability, the environment, and the response, is couched in the failure-breeding win-lose concept of trading off economic wealth for environmental benefit. Unless this twin, win-win concept of sustainability, achieved within the few short years remaining, is the conceptual basis for all economic development activities, and all international agreements, such as the daughter of Kyoto, we will fail ourselves and our children. We do this by embedding the central concepts of the economy of nature at the heart of the human economy so that human economic processes enhance the environment (the economy of nature) while simultaneously producing the life-support (wealth) that humans need. This is the direction of success, of wealth, of economic security and prosperity, of jobs, hope, and a real future. We must take it. 

As clear and simple as this concept is, how to accomplish it becomes the next question.  There are no simple answers, but simply asking the question and beginning to answer it is the first step, one which the international dialogue has rarely approached, let alone pursued aggressively and whole-heartedly.  Fortunately, other actors, from individuals, to firms, to not-for-profit organizations, to various levels of governmental organizations have an accumulating 20+year track record of asking this question and navigating the response. This base of experience would be a good place to start. (so the accumulated sustainability experience of humanity is relevant to inventory, assess, and distill into knowledge products (what’s a knowledge product).