America’s Eternal Star Power
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch,
whose flame is the imprisoned lightening,
and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome;
her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she with silent lips.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Etched beneath the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAEw-gtDkO4
Helene the Statue of Liberty is an appropriate symbol for your courageous mindfulness at facilitating this wild bunch of 1%’ers (cynics) calling for revolutionary action as global ethical citizenry. It definitely takes a committed woman to face the recursive global cultural denials on the arrested adolescent men’s playground capable of multitasking the diversity to rewire and thread the complex human conditions and situation in humanity. You inspire an emergent humanity that makes history consciously rather than suffering in old worn out mistakes. Let us learn to swim to the island of sanity together as a joyful concern singing, dancing and laughing at a past that has out lasted its usefulness.
In our daily lives, jungle of modernity, we have lost sight of the power of love in leadership by one who really cares and wants nothing other that the joy of love’s presence in a world of others. We rush out in reactive panic to survive when in fact every moment opens is an opportunity to connect, bless and thrive from the power within one’s own heart-felt kindness, generosity, equanimity and surprising gracefulness. The drumming of your heart beat is unifying us in non violence appreciative conversation.
You, Helene, are inspiring us as a living candle in a moment of dark predatory chaos. The torch you have raised in this UN declaration is giving light to our lives through courageous demonstrating the simplicity the notion of commitment to care, feed and nourish our humanity in designing a future world together.
The Power of One is Inspiration! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQLj_JcaZcM
Thank you!
Thorbjoen I can’t promise to sketch pictures in the lines submitted. Severe case of indigo child with coloring pencils that ignores taken for granted boundaries. I like it. So please never take offense if I ignore the objects pointed to in System Thinking. It’s not personal. (Can I call you Thor? Saw the released THOR movie this weekend and we need some wise elder marvel action figures like you in the world?)
Introduction to Patric’s Future UN Wiki Comments:
If I am discerning this conversational situation properly (?) what Helene is saying is that Thorbjoen’s articulated distinction of discourses offers us an artistic sculpted strategic architect’s framing for expanding the Linked In conversational thread by creating specific domains of conversations to drill down into as a global community. And the ST design of widget’s to map, track, codify and coordinate is a secondary emergent concern to maintaining the free flowing open manner of learning and what to do?
The conversational learning is migrating to Wiki as a dialog capable of growing positive communication loops and potential initiative enterprises with UN or private funding. (I prefer private funding and creating a new self organized hedge fund called ethical global citizenry.) Finally, no one is getting paid or authorized to profit directly from the dialog. It’s a collaborative cooperative creative commons where what we are instituting is an informal approach in communication (no priests, lawyers, politicians, commanders, CXO, investors or gods), and every human cynic is taking a risk face~to~face in a shared linguistic appreciative inquiry. The only natural self organized mutual agreement is no swearing (except BS stands for bull shit and is actually American technical jargon intended to disrupt false assertions), slapping, spitting, hitting below the belt, stabbing, shooting or strangling another person based on a belief system; everyone is free to express their hidden cynic, insights, wisdom, possibilities, ignorance or stupidities with out fear of personal negative attacks (such as tar and feathered or mob hangings) or characterizations that to be slammed out on every global social network with an intent to basic make the individual commit suicide.
The appreciative conversation is self regulated by global ethical citizenry and everyone is vigilant in a dignified manner of appreciation of one another. Laughter is never ever permitted in this serious hopeless situation and System Thinkers are here to keep it serious forever.
(I just had start by celebrating a good start so far by Helen of Troy, no wars, and I am actually starting to feel a ray of confidence before digging deeper into these creative collapsing global opportunities. That torch your caring is working!)
Is that true? I call these informal co-creative traditions we are creating into question as a reality check, pinch me please. (Steven Spielberg will want make a movie documenting the event.) I appreciated the invitation by Gene months ago to join the System Thinking group and I am surprised to be here after initially being characterized as a barbarian at the gate. All I did was challenge “cordial hypocrisy” by calling everybody assholes. Fortunately there are a few other cynical barbarians in the ranks of monetizing data to information for the sole purpose of accumulating power by excluding others and appropriating for one’s own self importance. I promise to never tell who they are even under threat of torture; waterboarding. It’s like entering a chamber of nerds pissed off and realizing they have actually taken over the world and your survival is dependent on becoming friends with them as people who may not know how to drink, sing and dance (as engineers speaking in quantum algorithms). Thank you Gene for your patience and sense of humoring me.
I love the wild wilderness of the ecological mindful awareness I have discovered through Fernando Flores, Humberto Maturana, Fransico Verela, Gregory Bateson, Teilard de Chardin and historic contemplatives to many to ever name that litter ever unit of humanity. My desire in this emergent conversation is to have an interactive design conservation that produces effective actions in leadership, not talk ourselves to death. Since the migration to UN Wiki I have been diligently studying the thread, researching links offered, and journaling privately.
As a cynic I am a “reluctant accidental activist in this UN conversation” looking for justice in human affairs as a principle for sustainable community good. I don’t want any “thing” other than to have the free rights and treatment of a dog, able to live in a bathtub out in open sleeping under the stars, and have the right to tell Alexander the Great if he passes by to move on your blocking the sunlight, of course, with a pleasant peaceful dog smile ear to ear.
IF this is a real interactive design conversation, praise the Lord? I feel safe at finally sharing my heartfelt comedic assessments that range from absolute brilliance to confused emotional contradictive stupidities. I have chosen to respond in this UN Wiki purposefully. I suspect this is the blogging opportunity of a lifetime. My commitment to engage in public conversation has some hidden fears (prefer being shot from the front like with Gandhi and please no throwing in me in the toilet like St John of the Cross). The hanging someone on a tree is always an acceptable prayful way to end a conversation and my Lakota friends due ever year. The only problem is everybody with an ethical sense of justice is flying to Pine Ridge every summer and want their turn. I think we should not hang children it’s turning into a blood feast.
I am fragile imperfect and anything I offer is limited by a prejudicial historical frame of reference; I am a human being, retarded monk and incompetent in many areas (especially with women), and not stupid in all domains of interactions, and value having a beginners mind that is just now learning how to be an observer giving a report of human experiences within discourses, not taking human ignorance personally. So Please be patient, everyone is an expert in my book, including babies. If you are looking for short 140 character twittering responses, please stop reading, and go about your business as normal, I am sure another rapture is going to happen soon. DO NOT READ any further. Bye.
I have heard all my life how crazy I am; too deep, too complicated, too intense, too reactive and too verbose etc. I no longer desire prove, protect of defend anything I say and I care about what happens to us and in my deluded virtual identity I know I am totally expendable and have no self importance. There is no self just co-created relationships. Dogs have actually taught this to me in human experience.
I approach this conversation as a retiring cynic, comedian and indignant new warrior (no guns or money just a voice with no mute button) that has swallowed enough of the American Dream Experience (BS) to choke an elephant. I can only wonder what Bi Moon’s clarion call for a revolution action is in global leadership. I invite Bi Moon to participate in this appreciative UN Wiki discourse if his attention permits the freedom to do so. Let him speak up for himself as an authentic imperfect informal human being in real~time and pure~play explaining his vision of what he intends by global revolutionary activities?
I am no historical, political, economic or social expert in framing activities for a global revolution. I am a person deeply concerned about our human condition, situation and future generations. My days are numbered, thank goodness, and this twinkling act of embodiment will close in its appropriate moment. I feel like many people I know are like myself an orphan, stranger, beggar that just desire to recover a little innocence in a world gone mad in competitive arrogant aggression.
Are there any kind, gentle, caring people left? Of course there is, we do and experience this everyday in the domain of friendship.
I agree with Mark Malloch-Brown’s authentic assessments offered in “The Unfinished Global Revolution” with hands on UN experience. I trust an elder man that wises up as a cynic and declares openly that diplomats are paid professionals instructed to lie for their country. And with recent Wiki leaks we know he was telling the truth. He may be the ultimate global whistle blower drilling down into systemic appearing breakdowns from unemployment to environmental distress disclosing the international roots in the Washington Consensus leadership gone crazy with self-importance. I invite Mark to join this UN Wiki conversation. Regardless read his book, I have promised myself to finish reading it by December 21st 2012. Good reading is hard to come by and the last chapter was great. Why hurry your not going anywhere?
I see breakdowns as entrepreneurial hinges in our human experiences. We are facing a convergence of creative collapsing opportunities at the edge of global predatory chaos. Aren’t you excited and wonder what we can do together? There must be a pony in this much BS or at least a smiling cow with some new tits to feed us? We are in a hopeless state of denial with problems appearing to be insurmountable thank goodness we created them, so in the final analysis mistakes are repairable, we just need to wake up that it’s simple and not complex We can’t repair the condition and situation by denying the causation. Yes, the future is determined by the possible possibilities in revolutionary activity we entertain in leadership conversations and every global ethical citizen is a leader. Before starting to add my two cents in a discourse, I submit that my prejudicial stance may have many authentic blind spots as an “observer” and I invite you to assist me in grounding my assertions or challenging my ignorance in formulating an invitational UN initiative for a “Generative Leadership Renaissance in the 21st Century.”
I am a global DJ on BlipFM/THEORDEROFEARTH since the Neda’s death during the Iranian uprising in June 2009. I love the experience of music. It’s all-good and it’s better to yell and scream than commit suicide or homicide, including all the historic wars. I imagine our ancestors learned to sing poetic songs with a simple drum (the human heart) before modern culture turned language into “teeth and claws” of numbers based in power to exclude and appropriate for survival. The idea of numbers was a definite mistake. So I will attempt to remember to in my UN Wiki Posts to leave with a song.
Here is one that rocks and challenges the notion of the “Illuminati.” Not Afraid” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5-yKhDd64s
Next Post May 21, 2011 Global Real Time ~ Pure Play Generative Leadership
We have multiple diverse domains of leadership colliding in globalization in discourses, institutions, nations, ethnicity, business, and the deep-rooted units of psychic spiritual cultural flows of behaviors as specie. I want to start by pointing to two contradictory events I experienced today as an observer. First, the prediction by regressive fundamentalist preacher of the “end of the world” who is sitting on $70 million of contributions to his notions of fear, hell and destruction of the planet by the written word. And second Peter Day’s BBC Global Business radio called “Infomania” pointing to the common human concern we are all feeling in regards to emergent digital technology. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gnxv1#synopsis
(Helene shared a gathering at the UN Global Pulse meeting where the distinction schizophrenia was used in assessing UN institutional leadership behaviors. Maybe Helene can add the link. I found the conversation very revealing, rewarding, and informal authentic dialog with current overwhelm. UN Open Global Pulse conversation. 2-11-11
http://www.unglobalpulse.org/blog/video-thursdays-open-un-panels)
The prejudicial bias I have is that we (humanity) are on the verge of a quantum leap in learning where we are bringing forth in the “Noosphere” (collective human consciousness) an emergent world where our accumulated knowledge is doubling every two years. We are entering an ecological age where our learning experience is disclosing a living universe not a dead one, and our reflective nature is at the center of a new innovation of humanity. The point is that 500 years of printed human knowledge changed the game of our collective knowing experience called “globilization.” We created one single planetary living network in the process of reflective learning. Today with the explosion of technological digital VAN’s data, information and communication is ready-at-hand in the globalization process. We are at the beginning of a new epoch in social learning as a living humanity. We have no historic map, compass of strategy or person(s) with primary ethical know how to guide the emergent landscape, and our behaviors in human consciousness are being deeply challenged.
I submit our first step in this inquiry is to face the shallow optimism of our current intentions by owning the denial of the current overload, stressful shadow effects occurring in living, and the debilitating illness we are experiencing in individualism. Modernity’s psychological subjective relativism is destroying our world and we are behaving collectively like it doesn’t exist. Mr. Day’s presentation of “Infomania” reveals how raw economic data is turned into monetized information for business decisions creating capabilities to “Re-Target” global economic decisions based solely on profitability of competing interests even within the same organizational structure. The heart of this global digital systemic economic process is to make a fortune in cut throat economic activity in a millisecond that has the capability of breaking a sovereign nation instantly. Economists have difficulty understanding the arcane esoteric algorithisms for credit default swaps and derratives and the masses of global investors no longer trust the global casino based on ROI. It’s turned into a frightening unpredictable and unsustainable fantasy land.
In addition, we have emerging social learning networks in print, music and imagery that is producing a flood of new breakdowns being reported as every person in the world becomes a reporter of either a breakdown or possibility in a domain of subjective human, business or political concern. No one is able to keep up with the knowledge explosion and it is overwhelming leaders and knowledge workers ability in daily practice to effectively communicate. Instead of increasing creativity we are being traumatized by the increasing drama in 24/7/365 experience of being human beings in an unsustainable situation. We are becoming disabled in moods of distrust, confusion, resignation, and despair in the stressfulness of feeling, thinking and taking effective actions in our condition and situations. Suicide is a major cause of death and the majority of suicides happen on Wednesday, the mid week hump, when the copying mechanism fail and an person can’t make it to Friday’s Happy Hour.
A bad global idea or notion today can threaten the soverniety of a member nation instantaneously and throw the entire UN institutional system into chaos overnight. Or a people like Egyptians in non violence can demand a new possibility as game. Is that true or not?
Sustainable Ecological Age
The Insights of Gregory Bateson on the Connections Between Language and the Ecological Crisis http://www.ecoling.net/Bateson-_Lang-ecol_J.pdf
Richard D. Wolff: “Personal Debts”
http://www.truth-out.org/richard-wolff-personal-debts68637
Paul Collier on the “bottom billion”
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_collier_shares_4_ways_to_help_the_bottom_billion.html
Understanding Computers and Congnition
Noam Chomsky: Is the world too big to fail?
http://www.ikners.com/?p=10236
I find Dave Pollards writings articulating the denial, hypocrisy and cynicism we face in his posts http://howtosavetheworld.ca/
Noam Chomsky: ‘The U.S. and its Allies Will Do Anything to Prevent Democracy in the Arab World’ May 2011
My V3W is a relaunch. The initial launch was here in Denver with Farmers Insurance Group pilot project. You may find my history as an entrepreneur interesting here in Denver in this Groubal Complaint.
Here is the basic business design for the V3W relaunch.
1st V3W Office of the Future ~ compete directly against Facebook for privacy of personhood and next iteration of Linked In as a professional social networking; where diverse professional global expertise rather than looking for work actually go to work in an office based on enactive embodiment of of human commitment within a closed “Confidential Communication Private Business” closed office system. Secondary market individuals take control of the content of their lives health, banking, insurance, education and social networks. V3W is speculating on obtaining a CSC OEM global agreement to facilitate V3W office using the “Action Engine” as core design database. Action Tech’s core technology is like “mortar” capable of building Internet infrastructures in a dynamic fashion and manner. The V3W Office is private clouding technology, secure, safe and robust learning environment for emergent “RAPIDLY FORMED NETWORKS” that has no limits or boundaries in addressing current or future breakdowns in permanent domains of human and business concerns. The V3W network is restrained ethically by mutual agreements of private “personhood’s” as a closed system eliminating the growth of industrialized “state~private~corporate~plutocracies” as the driver. (Steven Jobs can “be” in the Office and “Apple” cannot.) In other words the system is P2P perpetually.
I submit three strategic components to V3W relaunch:
1. Capital Ownership (a V3W Hedge Fund Notion limited to 500 participants) focused on we constituting capital investments in sustainability and designing large capital infusions of capital in systemic transformations driven by entrepreneurial endeavors in broad and diverse domains of human and business concerns. The primary notion of the first enterprise is to defeat the Facebook notion of privacy currently offered by Goldman Sacks that human beings are robotic transactional configurations with no intelligent capabilities to be “pro consumers” in a learning environment. The offer today is for 500 power players concerned in the global creative collapsing opportunities at the edge of chaos to contribute $1,000 non profit contribution to “Maka Si Tomni” to develop the core team and potential V3W platform. The financial opportunity for these 500 patrons is to become the capital owners of V3W Hedge Fund in a private placement in 3rd or 4th quarter of 2011.
2. Cooperative Membership is an economic decision of individuals to participate in shared global future as professionals in the Office of the Future. For planning purposes let’s assume the monthly minimum investment at $100 (there is no limit in the amount one may invest in the shareholder seat in the future V3W office) and it’s agreed no dividends to be paid out for 10 years. The capital investments become a pro consuming global network gathering human commitment and harnessing trust in effective pro effective purchasing activities as a standard practice. For instance cost of gasoline. It has been proposed for many years that consumers could drive the cost per gallon of fuel down by effectively boycotting Exxon globally for 30 days. The real power in economics is the purchasing power of the consumer, taxpayer and citizenry decisions. Our collective purchasing power is a pro intelligent consumption capable of producing history making events that wrestles the power from current financiers and politicians in globalization. The V3W Office of the Future offers a level playing ground in “personhood” offering innovations as natural flows in social learning.
3. Creative Common Entrepreneurial Incubator is reconfiguring current notions of “intellectual proprietary property” from a competitive industrial process development to an innovative dynamic business process global engine committed to addressing permanent domains of human and business concerns. Such as water, food and fuels. Knowledge in this emergent collective “Noosphere” is doubling at an increasing exponential rate and we are currently unprepared for the ramifications in human consciousness. Dynamic global corporate business enterprises have Redesigning Industrial Age structures, patterns and processes is a viewpoint of sustainability and building biosphere for future generations is the key driver. Goal take out Facebook as a social network and offer global ethical citizenry an alternative learning and production singularity based in human commitment and solidarity of pro consumptive effective activities.
2nd “V3W~CMT” relaunch where the business strategy previously was “high volume and low impact” focus on “low volume and high impact” 150 large losses as a “Global Collaborative High Risk Management Network” incorporating think tanks, reinsures and insures, corporate performance engines, governments and NGO’s with a two prong enactive embodied approach: emergency mitigation of condition and situation, and long term history making breakthrough to condition and situation as 3rd party administrative facilitator as primary business segment.
3rd “21st Century Leadership Conversation” where I am primarily committed long term and that is the notion of a new emergent institutional configuration based in power of business I call “The Order of Earth” that transcends current anomalies in governance, scientific and religious indoctrinated belief systems based once again in personhood’s of elder wisdom.
Vlad Kunko • ditto
Back to simple systems precepts …
Simply … Systems Thinking towards a Systems Epistemology
Systems Thinking – “Everything is connected” … “A system is always a part of another system and greater than the sum of its parts.”
: : Interconnectivity … Relationships, Proximities, Sequences
: : Intentionality of Structure / Process / Content … Teleology, Architectonics, Fit
: : Distribution of Matter & Energy – Stocks <> Flows … Resource Exchanges
: : Ordering / Transference … Convergences / Divergences … Potentiality
: : Opposition >< Synergy … Resource Competition >< Consensual Coordination
: : Flexibility & Diversity > Resilience … Adaptability, Survival and Fitness Maximizing
: : Equilibrium … Homeostasis
: : Cybernetics: Communication of 1st Order (Machine) // 2nd Order (Human)
… rather much like tuning a piano.
Strategic Denial of “dead speech acts” in organizational living is the underlying problem in human existence.
“Strategy Plan fail because the lack of Inspiration, Vision, Compromise, Integration, Communication and Commitment of all of the parties (from the highest corporate to the lowest corporate levels). With out these ingredients, your strategy plan will be flouting in the middle of no were.”
Population is a Tipping Point Global Conversation
@David thank you for your encouragement my friend. I use to listen and play music in retirement and now I am consumed in learning about future business ontology. Let’s press beyond this feeling of hopelessness (moods of resignation and despair) in our world. Let’s plant ourselves on the edge together and deliver a new simplified core business ontology engine that transforms this19th century reductive educational prejudicial ignorance. What @Aaron points to and is consistently calling for. @Vlad is an ultimate designer embracing personal hands on connecting us back to the garden, our household on earth.
@T.A. your skillful means of facilitating this conversation is a gratifying learning experience. I trust your handling of the rudder on our boat with @Nick’s overseer position in the eagle’s nest. I offer a few assessments:
*Globalization is now associated with sustainability and developing a moderate consumption~oriented ecological footprint as an agreed upon solution in our humanity. To achieve solidarity in our population concern requires innovative actionable rules for engagement in a new future game that primarily agrees on the fragility of our shared habitat and commitment to artistically sculpturing new values in living together. Encouraging diverse learning in all the historic pathways in the units of our humanity, especially hearing indigenous peoples who are not part of current excesses of consumption. I propose indigenous peoples offer us a reflective transformation from a universal economic fantasy of Disneyland to a contemplative multi~verses capable of valuing quality of life in learning over quantity of technological entertainment going nowhere.
*The conversation has produced significant agreed upon distinctions; locus of person as control in learning, innovation and decision making, poverty as a root cause of uncontrolled populations and future political instability, unsustainability of global state private corporate monopolies narrow short term ROI capital objectives, and a comprehensive map identifying the breakdowns in processes.
*The vital challenge to address root causes of inequality and poverty in our world is how do we gather human trust and harness the will power for cooperative collaboration? For solidarity to arise in conversations the virtual platform is an open ontology while simultaneously a robust rigorous coordination of diverse expertise intent on history making teams as a continual learning process for future generations ~ perpetual learning and innovations.
*The political fight between global integration and greater personal control are not easy allies to enjoin together in any appreciative inquire. I submit every step achieved in any consensual solidarity of citizenry will be challenged by competing systemic powers of leadership. So the real question in moving from talk to walk is what is the “mortar” binding the wounds, breakdowns and innovations? Dignity in personhood is my suggestion.
*We are a small conclave of explorers facing gargantuan international, national, local political institutional and global business structures, patterns and processes. Let’s take a moment to celebrate the audacity we have already enactively embodied. Whoopi doo!
*Our inquiry has led us to a point where the question of “too many people” is irrelevant, and ending poverty is paramount. My assessment is we will never reduce our current concerns to a “single agreed upon document, notion, concept” yet we can formulate an agreed upon anchor of an ethical agreed upon learning institution as persons building trust in our professional diversity to care, feed and nurture our household of humanity ~ the earth and it’s peoples.
@Dennis I agree that the Linked In platform leaves us wanting in moving to the next step of bundling our commitment in recurrent conversations producing effective actions. And adding
@Daniel’s questions pointing to creating positive feedback loops in communicative learning processes is inspiring. My assessment is the learning/project oriented facility/utility in the future is autonomous empowerment of personhoods not state, corporate, educational or religious institutions. I envision an interactive communication and management platform that transcends current systemic patterns in processes capable of grounding radical revolutionary innovations in 21st century in pro consumers driving markets and innovations.
@T.A. regarding ‘Unlimited Growth’ versus ‘Finite Planet’ My suggestion is to focus on water as the first in depth exploration in this thread for the following reasons: 1) everyone deserves to have fresh clean water and no political economic structure has the right to control or deny it’s distribution. 2) observing what we do and have done to water historically is a process of learning about mistaken patterns we currently take for granted. 3) watersheds and hydrology transcends current political boundaries, economies, unifies gender, races and theological arguments. 4) water is a ready-at-hand connection to sharing a planetary system. If we change our viewpoint on water we change adaptations in governance, economies and global performance engines.
“Our Angst is Liberation.”
@James Tiny Tim is an interesting choice thanks for the entertainment and lightening up mood by tip toeing through the garden. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skU-jBFzXl0
As a human being I am an “arational autopoietic observer” always already in a process of making instantaneous assessments and deciding what is reality or an illusion. I often am mistaken based in the emotional confusions I entertain in conversations attempting to depict reality from illusion. This always occurs in coordination with others and my queen bee is very masterful of pointing out my stupidities. As a cognitive agent, like others, I parachuted into a swept along historic cultural drift where a constellation of people (authorities) offered BELIEFS of reality demanding my obedience and negated my trust of determining “reality’ as a free cognitive agent. I have witnessed personally that going along and getting along in the drift provides some notion of contentment in the domain you call entertainment; like attending an orgy in subjective relativism. Likewise I have witnessed through experience that waking up and owning one’s own assessments of reality is dangerous business. Many end up committing suicide or homicide confronting the emotional contradictions in structures, cultural patterns and processes in the standard practices of communities. (If you get to either of these emotional states please give me a call to say “Good Bye” and I promise I won’t try to save you. I just want you to know that I valued your friendship we have shared.) In the end I assess we are all crazy in modernity by placing so much seriousness on what we believe, self importance in the scheme of things, and guilt for the mistakes we have made. Embracing what we don’t know we don’t know is scary business because there is no certainty of anything, we begin to own our thrown “object” orientation and explanations as being . The “observer” becomes completely responsible for the “reality” experienced with others.
James I agree there is dynamic quantum universe of cause and effect operating in perfect orderly structural determinism. I actually rely on it everyday in eating, drinking, walking and playing with others. My assessment is the “First Cause” is an undefined creative generative principle that constitutes, sustains and maintains a living universal web of life; yesterday, today and tomorrow. We may call this living happening “God” yet it is not a static linear descriptive reality rather an experience that occurs in the psychic dimensions of one’s own personhood. In the end anyone’s reflective contemplative analysis is humbled in the ‘experience’ of encountering directly the presence of life and moral beliefs literally disappear. No one is the totality of cause and at best in our deepest autopoietic experience we can only sense a feel our connection to this immutable living cosmology that we belong to as virtual observers.
We love life and in the end facing the current creative collapsing opportunities at the edge of chaos where there is moods of distrust, confusion, panic and uncertainty there arises a passionate desire to reorganize our patterns of living to see another day. As you say “Suicide is Painless” just stay asleep in the ever narrowing inferno of human suffering surrounding you. This innate desire to thrive does not arise out of a demand for obedience or survival, rather it is a natural embodied autopoietic instinct of being a Homo sapiens amans; a wise-sing up animal. Discussing this appreciative generative creative principle is a conversation of psychic spaces with many unconscious archetypes in the units of our humanity. Exploring psychic dimensions may be a future horizon in the contemplative civilization I imagine. Our agreement as a future humanity is a fragile benevolent vulnerable inner experience of a shared psychic ethical embodied trust that when harnessed is capable of arresting the immature adolescent grandiose behaviors of individual empowerment. No one as a revelator of the experience of spirit is God; rather a person (every person) is always giving a report based on experience and judging it as “good” or “evil” is a mistake. It’s simply a report by an observer learning.
James “the meek shall inherit the earth” it’s law not a moral judgement. If we observe T.A.’s submission of current consumptive behaviors of the top 5% of humanity it only appears they have power in our current condition and situation. In the end they consume themselves through the natural law you point to by demands for obedience in a distinction called a free market by negating the legitimacy in coexistence of others as objects: property. In truth playing God only brings forth your own death as we witnessed with Osama Bin Laden. Pretending to know what is “good” for everyone is the mistake we make in leadership. The real stretch is mentoring the emergent goodness in every virtual identity as a narrative of a human brotherhood. The poor, sick, imprisoned, disabled, mentally ill are opportunities to care, feed and nourish our own human identity. They express the collective shadow effects occurring in the dance of our human drama and trauma. Any arrogant aggressive utterance of being better is a denial, hypocrisy and cynical gesture of our disconnectedness within a living cosmology (God) as an observer. Blaming and shaming is the root cause of both perpetrator and victim.
To love my grand daughter who is 2 is not task at all rather a natural blessing that flows easily. To love all the children in the world as my grand daughter is an ethical enacted embodiment of the creative generative principle naturally embedded in our humanity. I desire that my grand daughter experience that love in her future world. I claim it is easy and flows naturally everyday in the majority of peoples doing, what they do, when they do the things they do. It’s not a mysterious illuminati notion of moral reductive beliefs nor does it need any explanation or organization or priests. We love naturally as Homo sapiens amans because we embody First Cause in our biological genetic structure.
So our humanity now shares a home called earth. Reconfiguring the old stove pipe patriarchal beliefs, structures, patterns, processes does not need to be a war nor ontological argument of spiritual interpretations based in power. We are encouraged by the continuing appreciative inquiry in this emergent understanding of sharing a biosphere. The notion of a Gaia (1970) is a reflection of a living system (“object”) we share as a single household for our permanent generational concerns. Every child born today see’s a new imagery of home called earth. We are waking up and masses of humanity are on the move today declaring freedom, dignity, and calling forth new values in non violence for self organized justice in human affairs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
“Ending Poverty” imho is not a choice it’s a demand masses of people are making confronting patriarchal power in the swept along blind historic cultural drift. I am just starting to see Tiny Tim after months of rubbing up with you in many Linked In group conversations. The “objective and object” Agreeing on systemic forces in modern economic history since 1492 is a creative collapsing reflection of our breakdowns and when appreciated demonstrate the mistaken conceptions in state-private-corporate plutocracies and a brutal disruption of indigenous peoples connection to water, land and earth as a living learning growing experience. We must face globalization in economics and design positive feedback loops that reconnect people to the estate they rightfully belong to and no body owns in power. In addition put the brake to the floor “contracting this infinite notion of expansiveness based in meaningless consumption as free market financiers.” Free market has hit the ocean floor. Wall Street’s notions are unsustainable even in the near term.
The reflection brings me to the realization that our “robotic cultural economic behaviors” are experiencing ‘future shock” and we are unprepared for the learning experience about to occur in our humanity. How do we redesign our current value systems from “buying and selling one another” as a means of survival to trusting an emergent artistic sculpturing of our permanent human concerns, professions, activities that build the earth for future generations? It’s a choice we are confronting at the end of an old world.
My interest is in how leadership through business design invents an interactive communication and management global process where business people shift current actionable behaviors from “management by financial short term ROI objectives” to the teleological ontological analysis of business as an ethical learning center incorporating the full range of stakeholders in any future business decision. The notion includes capital investments, leaders, management, staff, customers, shareholders, citizenry, country, humanity and the environment. I imagine a day in the near future where water, hydrology, and plants are considered in business decisions as normal practice. People are not fired from employment they are mentored in learning by wise elder’s called leaders. I imagine a humanity where every individual human narrative is a treasure trove participating in trusted human commitment caring, feeding and nurturing life, living, dignity, and freedom. War ends and no one has the right to demand obedience of anyone and thriving is experiencing positive feedback loops in learning from the mistakes we seem to worship in our daily lives.
Helene Finidori [Giraud]
UN call for revolutionary thinking and action to ensure an economic model for survival… How to make this happen?
Stephen Scott Wright • IMHO, It won’t. What will happen, is that it will gain increasing support and some improvements will be made..but there is zero chance of major change..in the timeframe needed. I also suspect there are and will be other more pressing problems which will occupy us in the near future and our fight for survival…
Eero Hollming • The first Davos-day suggested first more credit to be fed into The Mighty Machine to save us but increasing growth to continue. Although such pouring of vast billions quite opaquely therein, other options seen as perilous to survival. Couple of more days sweating there with real challenges, gives us some slight hope about an alternative with Ban Ki-moon’s address. Time to turn to a systemic flow-analysis based systemic response approach?
Aligned with Ban Ki-moon’s thoughts of connecting the dots, a macro-level systemic commitments-view needed to the macro-level through-life innovation-funnel? The much celebrated innovation to be tamed into appropriate renewal roles and perspectives across such vast systemic transformation flow… @http://bit.ly/ekoBGf
Comments? Unfortunately however, Stephen’s comment may seem more like outcome in near term.
Helene Finidori [Giraud] • @Stephen. What would be the road blocks (zero chance) and the other more pressing problems?
@Eero. I’m always amazed by your representations of which I only partly grasp the substance and potential. Do you have possibilities to represent this in 3D in an animated way that walks your public through your thinking?
My question is incomplete. I should have added who/what can make this happen?
*Actually and effectively getting into this systemic flow-analysis based response
*Implementation
Gene Bellinger • @Ilia, might we get a short one line definition of each of the following from your context so we’re all lined up on the foundation?
* System
* Task
* Environment
* Process
Stephen Scott Wright • Threats
Prophecies 2012
major shakeup on the world stage between the current powers
Pandemics http://pandemic.avianbirdsflu.com/article.aspx?pageId=97
Plague and pestilence, scientists estimate that 30% of the land based organisms and diseases are still unknown and a vector with modern society may have disastrous consequences.
Tectonics/Siesmographic events.. Earths magnetic field is somehow tied to this activity. Siesmo link is at http://www.iris.edu/seismon/
Suggesting that any major change in earths magnetic fields would have some large and unknown effect on the underlying tectonic plates. The magnetic poles drift every year..usually they drift only a few inches per year…this year they have drifted so much (40 miles a year) that airports have had to close and reorient their magnetic runway guidance systems. http://www.redorbit.com/news/oddities/1975752/magnetic_pole_shift_forces_runway_closure_at_florida_airport/
it appears beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are in a geomagnetic pole reversal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
We also know that earths magnetic field and the Sun interact bringing us to 6. NASA has predicted that at the end of this solar cycle (they are 10.7 years on avg.) a violent “Carrington Effect” storm may happen and that the sun has been behaving strangely during this solar cycle http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/29may_noaaprediction/
Helene Finidori [Giraud] • @Stephen. I am aware of these threats.
Are you saying that because we will be doomed, we -and those who govern us on a planetary scale- should just sit, do nothing, and wait for evolution or destiny, god, nature, the invisible hand of the market… to “do its job”?
If we can’t do much more than anticipate, minimize impact and maximize recovery for cataclysmic threats, there are things to be done on what depends on human behaviors. And my question was aimed at identifying who there was out there that could have a global view on the challenges/threats faced by the planet, and to lead to some effective solutions.
I understand that national, monetary, power interests are at stake here, but what will all these interests be worth if as you anticipate everything collapses? Isn’t the responsibility of World leaders to ensure long term survival?
What I fear is that the doom discourse makes the mountain to climb seem so huge that everybody gives up, whereas there are pockets of consciousness, responsibility and possibilities to tap into to push in the right direction...
To schematize… localizing production and use of water/energy/food would not only work towards a more sustainable/hungerless future, but allow resilience in case of a major break down...
Stephen Scott Wright • we do need a wake up call…there is a storm coming.
My intent is NOT to espouse fear, rather make a call to action. I believe that the biggest “natural disaster or fear” we will have to face are the endless political pontification, circular debates, intellectual postering and unrealistic solutions that are being presented, as a serious attempt to address the problems or change our world. I am a man of action. If I believe something..I take action. Theories, positions and slide shows don’t make change, plans and discussions, dont create change, only actions do. A plan without action…is a fools errand.
So what I espouse to others and mankind in general is this;
1. Wake UP! spiritually…quit being a slave to the flesh. Realize you are a spirit and get right with God..
2. Wake UP! Intellectually and realize that action is required to ensure both your physical and spiritual survival. Realize that YOU must act.
3. Prepare! Take action by changing your lifestyle..seek spiritual maturity, go more green, limit your Carbon foot print…start preparing yourself to live “Off the Grid” by learning a basic skill set that will be useful when you do. Start a garden….much peace can be found there.
4. Buy a remote piece of property and build an “off the grid” home..it can be done relatively inexspensively…do it in steps..let this place be your vacation home until you need it for more. Try to work your profession so that you can spend more time there.
5. Join like an organization of like minded people that are actually doing something to make the world a better place, …rather than talking about it. Participate.
6. Research what skills you will need to survive if all else fails..add those skills and start a side business doing something low tech that aligns with that skill set.
7. Realize that at some point of time you will be required to not only care for yourself..but others. So start by stockpiling basic food staples, medical supplies, water etc..have an emergency plan making sure all family members know what to do and where to go/meet/find each other, in the event of a disaster. Learn basic First Aide, what evacuation routes exist, have reference materials available for many subjects (Books and CD/DVD), learn to hunt and fish if you do not already know how.
8. Have EMP protected storage for vital electronics such as Laptop PC, Emergency Band/Shortwave Radio, crank flashlights etc.. This is easily done by storing them in used Ammo Boxes or any all metal container.
9. Realize that there is no and will be no political solutions to the problems ahead and that deception and force will ultimatley be used by the “Mighty Machine” and it’s succesor. Beware especially of any man who after things start to fail…provides a unified governmental solution to the worlds problems..especially one that becomes a world leader…Rather work in your community for change..solutions and assistance begin and end at home.
10. Wait and enjoy life with a peace that comes from knowing you have a saviour, you have made prudent precautions and are prepared to lend assistance to others when and if it is needed.
Ref site http://www.chrismartenson.com/
contains a manual, and other materials that corresponds to your suggestions
Alvin Toffler Foundation Fourth Wave Forum Next 40 years
http://www.toffler.com/docs/40%20for%20the%20Next%2040%20101011%20FINAL.pdf
Helene Finidori [Giraud] • Stephen. Thanks. I agree that global government is not the way. By Global governance, I implied thinking and action that transcends national interests, and looks at issues from a global (or rather integral?) perspective, encompassing all nations and all issues.
Global governance may not be the appropriate term. Here is the definition of global governance vs global government in wikipedia:
“Global governance is not world government, and even less democratic globalization. In fact, global governance would not be necessary, were there a world government. Domestic governments have monopolies on the use of force—the power of enforcement. Global governance refers to the political interaction that is required to solve problems that affect more than one state or region when there is no power to enforce compliance. Problems arise, and networks of actors are constructed to deal with them in the absence of an international analogue to a domestic government.”
You are right reproducing what reinforces status-quo or negative loop is not the way to go.
If you look at my other question: http://linkd.in/GrassrootsChange
, you will see that I am a strong promoter of “personal activism” and snowballing effect. But as far as the “big issues” are concerned, isn’t there a need to connect the dots, create a sense of common purpose, and channel, accelerate an emergence? Not necessarily through organization and planning…
How could the peaceful and constructive activism you are referring to, that would promote the adoption of global appropriate solutions to ensure the survival of humanity in harmony with nature, be channelled?
Ilia Bider • @Helene, here are my two cents. It looks like you are looking for a leverage point. I am afraid that UN call has not provided enough material for us to jump to this stage of a systemic project. For example who are stakeholders (positive, as well as negative ones), what are mental models behind their actions, etc. Until we have this cleared, e.g. according to Gene’s model of systemic intervention, it will be difficult to find potential leverage points. In addition to stakeholders analysis, I would suggested two issues for investigation.
1. What kind of economic system do we actually have, at least in the West? It is normally accepted that we have a regulated free market economy. Is it still so? In my mind free market implies enterprises having owners. Do we still have owners who bother about their enterprises and are interested to pass them to their heirs. Most enterprises are owned by funds, including pension funds, which is equivalent to they are owned by everybody and nobody, exactly as in pure socialism. This kind of a system put in charge the “old boys (and now girls)” mangers club, which might be worse than having real owners some of which are bad. Even entrepreneurship has changed its nature, instead of building companies to own and take care of them, many entrepreneurs are too eager to sell their companies as soon as possible at as high price as possible.
2. Is the current crises about economy? To introduce great change, you need great ideas that will move people harts, something on the level of Christianity, democracy of French Revolution, Communism, American dream, Putting a men onto the moon, i.e. something that gives life meaning, and sense of belonging. I doubt that liberalism promoted by today’s mass media can play this role. If you look from this point, the Tea party is quite a rational movement, they are a bunch of people that try to stick to the “American dream”, as nobody suggested any better idea of this magnitude. If the crises is not about economy, then it might be worthless to search for a solution in the economic sphere only.
Stephen Scott Wright • @llia, excellent points…
My comment on #1 The Economic System;
The current model in the west is what I call Quasi Free Market. In that it resembles a free market in theory but in application it is influenced and to some extent controlled by a minority of participants. The majority of the wealth created goes to a minority of the participants, who then use that wealth to influence the system such that it will always benefit them, regardless of actual market activity. The majority of the markets stakeholders however are minor participants who either try to organically grow and fund their business thru its market valuations or those who attempt to establish new trends and paradigms…these either sell out to the interests of the minority who control most wealth..or join the elite thru exuberant valuations…and begin to exert their influence on the market. Their influence extends thruout the Financial System and deep into the Political arena thru lobbying and donations, further preloading the system to favor them.
Unfortunately, many of the members of this elite minority operate under no moral values, their strategy is based entirely on profitable returns and demonstration of their power to influence the system. Many of these elite corporations have balance sheets that most nation states can only envy..and when there is confrontation on a given subject between the MultiNationals and Nation States…the elite win every time…even when they appear to have lost or are fined…it amounts to nothing more than tactical manuevering and when the dust clears…surprise surprise….there are the MultiNationals..acting as if nothing ever happened, while they rake the money in and invest in their power thruout the political realm. The governments are in collusion with them..so called “Partnerships for Progress”..because every politician needs funds to be reelected..and will retire someday..and when they do they will recieve a nice salary as a consultant or advisor..to the MultiNational Corp…who uses the former politician or military man as a “door opener” into the government…so new seeds can be planted. This has been going on for a very long time..in several economic models..these “unseen powers” influence currency rates, set defacto Governmental Policy, influence elections, eliminate competition and in some cases actually have caused governments to fall. @Helene, the dangers I mentioned previously are that these very same powers are as we speak engineering an economic collapse ( we have already had the dry run that biased the system so that the actual collapse will hand over both power and influence they way that they wish) to consolidate their power…do a google on the Bloombergs..there are others..also note that on the very popular “Are there too many people in the world?” thread, these unseen elites have an answer for that question…go to Youtube and search “Denver Airport” watch the vid..look at some of the others suggested by YouTube on the subject…note that this aligns with Bible prophecy…and you will see why I say..there is risk involved in trying to change the system…
@llia Your point two, I could not have said it better. I would only add that for me that power of the heart comes from Christianity. But in general, if you wish to incite change…peoples passions and fears must be aligned with someone who communicates a common vision that amplifies their hopes..and fears, so that a wildfire of passion powered activism, changes the status quo…but watch out…the elites will not go down without a fight…..and they WILL do anything to remove roadblocks to their dominion. Thats why I look forward to the “Great and Terrible Day of the Lord” foretold in Revelations..
Call to action of a teenager at the UN Earth Summit in Rio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZsDliXzyAY
Naomi Klein has shown some of the psycho/socio/economic/political mechanisms that lead to post WWII totalitarianism in her disaster capitalism book. As much as I would assume everyone in the “evil” power world wants to shut down any attempt to unveil the mechanisms of how what they are doing may lead to totalitarianism, I would expect the same evil powers would amplify these conspiracy theories and doomsday prophecies to play at the same time on fear and incredulity (never as bad…). Don’t you think that those who fuel into this narrative may unknowingly be reinforcing the mechanisms that lead to that? Probably the reason why the Prophets of Doom documentary on the History Channel pictures the most scary things as quite remote and improbable, and are quite light on actual doom, and concentrate as priorities on the relocalization/decentralization of water/food/energy production which at the same time addresses poverty and incidentally provide a good resilience capacity to dooms scenario…
@Ilia, thanks for your time! You point to two fundamental ingredients: ownership (which is not to be equated to wealth accumulation, but would rather encompass power to nurture and develop?) and spirituality (the big purpose) which have to do with what “pulls” humans into acting/behaving certain ways… You are right. I am looking for leverage points. I would agree that the answers are not to find in the economy only –but among those who hold and concentrate the power. As @Stephen mentioned in another thread power comes with responsibility. And I would add freedom ‘of the market’ comes with responsibilities, it’s not a license for all grabs. There needs some moral grounds. I’m not looking for ready made solutions, but trying to identify the forces, groups, initiatives, moral standing that are going to help move forward. It is little surprise given their power and the fact that they transcend nations, that Ban Ki-moon launched a new Global Compact initiative called Global Compact Lead with a group of 54 global companies as founding members, “who have committed to be at the cutting edge of environmental, social and governance issues, joining forces to translate sustainable development principles into business operations and deepening partnerships with the entire UN system…”. This will certainly have some effect. Especially if the “grassroots” stakeholders of the corporations start to globally –and peacefully- push for responsibility…
The Survival of Capitalist Democracies by Helene Finidori May 2008
http://menemania.typepad.com/helene_finidori/2008/05/the-survival-of-capitalist-democracies.html
Capitalism and democracy, can the two co-exist? The question I answered on another forum is indeed provocative.
I believe capitalism and democracy can successfully coexist in the long run only if economic actors become mature enough to police themselves in the way they conduct business, in “exchange” for freedom of market and reduced regulation.
In a democracy the people entrust a government to defend their individual freedom & rights and their interests as a society or nation, and to preserve a social order in a long term perspective.
Capitalism is based on the inalienable right to ownership and profit, and on the principle of a free market.
Conflict between capitalism and democracy occur when the exercise of freedom jeopardizes the rights and interests of the people and the interests of society at large.
In the past 30 years, many economists and management theorists have pushed the concept of freedom of enterprise and free market to a point where any intervention of the state or attempt to regulate the economic, social or environmental field is qualified as “socialism”. At the same time the world has seen more and larger frauds, scandals, crisis, and yoyo bubbles than ever, all in the name of free markets – including wars for democracy-, far from bringing the “equilibrium” expected.
Capitalism and free markets are not to blame here, but rather the behavior of economic actors. A free market does not confer the right to do anything at any cost, regardless of the impacts on people, societies or the generations to come. It can’t be a free ride to grab everything you can as fast as you can. In a democracy, freedom comes with duties and responsibilities. What is true at the individual level is also true for corporate economic actors. For democracy and its social contract to survive in a free market, the economic actors, whether individuals or corporations, must assume their social role (i.e role in society, not “socialistic” role) and take their part of duties and responsibilities. The counterpart of a free market and absence of regulation is the adoption of self imposed rules and principles for the conduct of business as an actor of society, and the accountability thereof. This proactive approach is what I believe Corporate Social Responsibility is ultimately about. When economic actors are not able to police themselves, they misuse the freedom they have been granted, and “the people” will legitimately want to impose more rules, or topple the system.
Proactive Corporate Social Responsibility is the safeguard that will prevent capitalist democracy to fall into socialism, anarchy or the reign of plutocracy…
Sweden -that I had the opportunity to observe for a few years- is probably ahead in its approach of capitalist democracy and practice of proactive CSR. The Swedish democracy is monitored and nurtured. It is the object, together with the cohesion of society, of continuous attentions though a long term engagement in democracy policies, because nothing is ever to take for granted.
To conclude, I would like to share a quote of Jean Jacques Rousseau that I particularly like:
“What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistake in weighing one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupier, from property, which can be founded only on a positive title.
We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.”
Jean Jacques Rousseau -The Social Contract – Book I, Chapter VIII
Just came across Drucker’s definition of freedom in relation to responsibility:
“Freedom is not fun. It is not the same as individual happiness, nor is it security or peace or progress. It is a responsible choice. Freedom is not so much a right as a duty. Real freedom is not freedom from something; that would be license. It is freedom to choose between doing and not doing something, to act one way or another, to hold one belief or the opposite. It is not “fun” but the heaviest burden laid on man: to decide his own individual conduct as well as the conduct of society and to be responsible for both decisions.” — Peter F. Drucker
http://thedx.org/2011/03/joes-journal-freedom-is-not-fun/
Helene Finidori [Giraud] • @Bryan. For me freedom and responsibility go hand in hand.
In an earlier post I suggested that “laissez-faire” and economic freedom shouldn’t be used as a right for grabs without the responsibility to the community and humanity & nature that comes with freedom -and I’m not talking of charity of philanthropy here! I’m talking of citizenship) I wrote an article on the survival of capitalist democracies a few years ago: http://bit.ly/fRUJq6”
Free citizens do not need laws to understand that murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, slavery is wrong… and to not do it. Economic players should not need regulations to understand that luring people into credit or into consumption is wrong… that playing on a credit default that will accelerate the default is wrong… that knowingly polluting and putting peoples lives in danger is wrong… yet, they do it. Again, if economic actors are not mature and responsible enough to police themselves and be accountable to society/humanity of their actions without laws, shouldn’t regulations do so?
It’s all too easy to say that corporations are not persons – except when it comes to freedom of expression of course!-. It is all too easy to say that responsibility is accountability in front of the law, but we want no laws, and all that is not forbidden is allowed. All this is highly manipulative rhetoric to serve specific interests…
Ilia is right about the disconnect between our economic model and ethics, but then, I would go further and ask if this is not the disconnect of economy as a science with ethics. French renaissance humanist Rabelais wrote in Pantagruel “Wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul”. So in the absence of conscience, see regulation as a way to “enforce” the right behaviors and responsibilities? I agree this is not the best way, but to minimize the effects that these behaviors engender, it may be a start… while trying to operate a “renaissance “of conscience and planting the seeds of conscience in future generations?
The disconnect between economy as a science and any form of ethics has led to dehumanization of economics, and allowed management theories to massively appeal to the weaknesses of mankind in a very reductionist way that have reinforced these weaknesses (self fulfilling prophecy)… The assumptions of micro-economics (and these are the ones that need some reintroduction of thought) are quite telling: humans only act according to their individual interest, more is better, people cannot be trusted… management theories are based on these types of assumptions, performance measurements and incentives are based on this type of thinking, this reinforces the behaviors and the negative impacts…
In another thread I suggested that we take the vices of humanity and looked at how/where they were put to play in the system… and then that we take the virtues and see how they were and could be put to work in reinforcing loops… in order to, as Ilia suggests, use the system to reinforce the virtuous rather than the vicious… Of course, I talk here of vices and virtues in a humanistic way and not a puritan one…
Signatures for Collegium Effort http://www.collegium-international.org/en/founding_texts/appeal.html
Let’s think ahead of tomorrow’s Dow Jones by Helene Fidori 9/13/05
http://menemania.typepad.com/helene_finidori/2005/09/lets-think-ahead-of-tomorrows-dow-jones.html
We live in a world driven by short term goals and rewards, at the expense of future generations. Do we really want to continue encouraging bad management practices and behaviors?
Day to day variations vs. yield or patrimonial perspective
The fact that capital gain has taken predominance over yield and long term revenue has affected mentalities and changed the relationship between the stockholder and the corporation in quite a cynical way. With a focus on next quarter’s bottom line and the share value tomorrow, who sees the overall wealth creation over 5 years? Who is the guardian of a company’s perspectives, reputation, liability and potential profits and wealth at say, 10, 20, 50, 100 years?
Short term money in emerging sectors
Ages ago, I learned that long term investments shouldn’t be financed by short term money. Huge capital is available in western countries waiting to be invested: short term/volatile capital rushes to finance “hit hot” markets -i.e. most of the time growing markets that require long term investments to consolidate. Of course, everyone wants a share of the same cake, that’s how bubbles build up, making these markets riskier than they should be -see Businessweek Too Much Money-. At the first blip, the rush is to pull back and the whole thing collapses, throwing the baby out with the bath water. I saw this first hand in South-East Asia in 1997, with all its implications on local people’s lives. When the IMF stepped in, conditioning its loans to a total and immediate deregulation of what was locally perceived as a social aid -i.e. subsidies on household energy, you got riots and unrest… Joseph Stieglitz explained this very well. Then came the internet… a perfect opportunity to place the cash divested from Asia…
No more investments in infrastructures
The maximization of short term profit is detrimental to long term investment and infrastructure: rare are those who invest in the US railroad or electrical distribution network, ROI is too far away, as a result, the power grid is in a terrible condition -and probably also a cause of energy waste- and the prospects of a Chicago New-York high speed train connection in 3hrs is not for tomorrow. What about the internet, could it have been created by the private sector today? Who will finance the infrastructures needed for its growth tomorrow.
Dilapidating assets and increasing liability
Last, and to put this issue in a financial perspective: our generation happily jeopardizes at no cost the assets of future generations. No “provisions” whatsoever are made today for the risk and cost our children will incur tomorrow -health, environment, natural resources…-. In addition our states live off “leveraged” deficits that future generations will have to finance…
Win/win has to be put into perspective, it’s not just here and now…
The survival of our economic model – Are we finally reaching a tipping point?
By Helene 1/14/11
Just a year after Seth Godin challenged the new generations to reivent themselves in his manifesto Brainwashed, Harvard Business Revue offers two articles which question how capitalism has evolved, and call for transformation.
The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value
The following is an abstract of the introduction of Michael Porter’s last article The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value in Harvard Business Revue Magazine Jannuary/February 2011.
“The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community…
…A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves, which remain trapped in an outdated approach to value creation that has emerged over the past few decades…
…Companies must take the lead in bringing business and society back together. The recognition is there among sophisticated business and thought leaders, and promising elements of a new model are emerging…
…The solution lies in the principle of shared value, which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress.”
Capitalism at a Crossroads
Simultaneously, Umair Haque, the Director of the Havas Media Lab announces his new book The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business.
In his HBR Blog article Capitalism at a Crossroads he draws the list of what industrial-age capitalism hasn’t been able to achieve in America during the last decade. He calls for a transformed capitalism to “create authentic, meaningful, lasting value for people, communities, society, nature, and the future… to fulfill its promise of being transformative, to continue to help humanity scale greater heights of achievement, discover deeper wellsprings of potential, and safeguard the hard-won spark of an enduring, authentic prosperity, it’s time to take a quantum leap beyond yesterday’s capitalism…”
He concludes: “The future belongs to those who create it. So what are you waiting for?” For action, please take a look at my previous post…
About Collegium International
http://www.collegium-international.org/en/about.html
Systemic disorders at a global level created an urgent need for a network that would provide the intellectual and moral integrity that could cohesively address them.
Collegium International endeavours to meet this challenge progressively by developing diagnoses, building concepts and creating forums with the ultimate goal of establishing blueprints for ethically responsible political policy and action. Prominent scientists, economists, philosophers and scholars engage, on a par with political figures at the highest levels, in a structured and ongoing exchange from which new ideas are sparked. At stake is meeting the demands of the historical present while taking the time to outline sound principles of governance by contrast to mere pragmatism. Sustainable forms of political policy at all levels are developed in opposition to shortsighted single-issue approaches. As such, the Collegium aims to provide a multifaceted warning that clarifies the causes of contemporary crises, and formulates coherent responses to the increasingly resounding question of what is to be done. In this spirit the Collegium produces scientifically informed and globally imperative guidelines for effective ethical action.
The Collegium maintains a dynamic relationship with the United Nations and its agencies, as well as with various political authorities and scholars, in an effort to make political policy responsive to the concrete needs and the legitimate concerns of people the world over. Uniting the high ethical standards of its members with their political and scientific expertise, the Collegium intends to provide bold and creative approaches to questions regarding the practical possibilities for a more just—and a more environmentally and economically sustainable—world. To this end the Collegium is preparing a White Book for publication, the successive chapters of which offer a systemic approach to confronting the interdependent crises that threaten the human and natural world. Beyond the White Book, the Collegium is preparing a publication series that tackles particular crises in their specificity.
Ilia Bider • Connecting ethics and economic system. According to Max Weber (”The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”), free-market economy was developed based on the protestant ethics of the north Europe. Loosing this ethic, which is a slow process, the free-market economy is loosing its soul (modus operandi). May be this is why we no longer have a free-market economy, but are on the way to something else. If people stop trusting each other when making business deals, we will need a lot of regulations, commissions, lawyers to keep the system going, which makes it slow and ineffective (too much overhead) and may lead to its death.
Returning to 54 global companies, if ethic is external and primary to the economic system, is it really possible that a new ethic is developed inside or supported by the system that is no longer based on ethical principles? Just a question, have no answer for it.
Bryan West • Fantastic discussion. leverage point will come from people themselves. Grass roots at its most basic level, as people come together out of basic need to survive. I doubt it will be something like we know community organisations in affluent nations The way in which these collections of people organise themselves, and also how they interact with other people, may well be the foundation of a new global governance. I am only guessing.
David Alman • Thank you Helene for the question.
Coincidentally I subscribe to Bruce Britton’s blogs, and he recently sent out the video The Story of Stuff
http://thelearningngo.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-story-of-stuff/
It’s about 20 minutes long but I found it well worth watching, and highlights the need to achieve a sustainable economic model for survival. If there are messages clearly explaining what’s wrong with the current “’linear” economic model and the need for urgent change here they are.
My general preference is to work out how I can help, and this generally means focussing on the organisation. So, thanks to Bruce, was starting to think about this when you’re Thread popped up, and thought I might share at this early stage with the possibility of others reflecting further ideas.
There are some web based articles such as “sustainable performance measurement for sustainable organizations” http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/033/005/ecp0803305.pdf and there are similar articles that either preface or elaborate on this approach that I picked up this morning. You can see that there is an elaboration of existing performance scorecards such as the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). Not exactly radical, but all this helps starts a possible shift.
My current focus is on developing approaches to improving Organisational Productivity using a systems thinking approach, and it occurred to me that this systems approach could be expanded.
Productivity is about the measurement of value (and non value) both in terms of (internal) efficiency and effectiveness of outcomes. The story of the concept of productivity reflects a shift away from only looking at “efficiency” to determining efficiency in an “effectiveness” context. Just as the “efficiency” value of economic models are being considered in their “effectiveness” context: Sustainability and Quality of Life terms (refer to Amartya Sen & UN publications).
Productivity can include (but not limited to):
a) Process Activity value/waste measured in time terms, as propounded by Toyota Production System (TPS); “lean”, Six Sigma, and Vanguard (this can be/is customer driven). A Human Designed System perspective.
b) Human interaction value/non value in terms contribution value, as exampled by Verna Allee in Value Network Analysis, and Patti Anklam’s Net Work. A Social system perspective.
To this could be added a natural environment system, for instance:
c) Sources value/waste in terms of volume, and possibly impact measures in some form.
David Alman • What does an economic model for survival look like to you?
I can imagine a range of dire scenarios of not having one, but what could one actually look like that people, communities, businesses, governments, and nations would want to buy into or accept?
What options are on the table or is it all too much and we will continue to look through the glass darkly and eventually let the straws fall as they will?
In “The Collapse of Globalism and the reinvention of the world” John Ralston Saul explains the mess we in and teases out some threads. Yet it seems to me that it is precisely this analysis by Saul that the Secretary of the United Nations is rejecting and in a sense is recommending we re-embrace the concept of Globalism when he said that we need “A free market revolution for global sustainability”….”to ensure sustainable, climate-resilient green growth”. Free markets and green growth? Can the colour black be white? Perhaps I misunderstand.
One reason why I liked “The story of stuff” was the practical alternative model offered at the end of the video as a substitution for the current consumerism based economic model. All areas of economic activity (even across continents and national borders) had their part to play (and could responsibly control and be accountable for) transforming the economic model into a sustainable one. In a sense it looked like a sustainably based “Keynsian” model of economics (a sustainably measured one rather than purely a monetary one) and therefore closed (and controllable) rather than an open systems model.
Perhaps its too late and we are left with an increasingly open systems economic model (despite efforts to close them) where the elements will reshape the future, sustainable or not.
David Alman • [A law which prevents free trade is a ] law which interferes with the wisdom of the Divine Providence, and substitutes the law of wicked men for the law of nature.” Richard Cobden, speeches, 1843. A quote from “The Collapse of Globalism.
Backcover quote “Globalism, like many great ideologies before it, is dead”.
Again I would ask, if we know what’s wrong with the current consumption driven “linear” economic model (refer to the Story of Stuff) something more than a tweak is necessary, and what would an economic model for survival look like?
“At the heart of the problem lies the Globalist idea of viewing society through an economic prism. In practical terms this has meant demoting the values – ethical and moral – of community in favour of the certainty that humans are primarily driven by self-interest.” page 97 of “The Collapse of Globalism”
Is the economic model for survival to be driven primarily by self interest (more of the same if its short term self interest) or community based values and ethics or both in some way where there is common purpose?
Helene Finidori [Giraud] • @Bryan. Interesting point. How do you picture this? A global stewardship made of the swarm of interactions… that keeps the whole thing on track… with its interconnections and interdependence?
Bryan West • “A swarm of interactions” Now that is a great phrase, and a fantastic image – thanks, Helene.
I do picture it as a swarm of sorts, although the amount of activity – and
quality of activity – will likely be unequally distributed across both time
and space. However, the activity combined with the movement of people and
ideas across groups may well catalyse new activities among old groups, and
new groups to form to conduct old activities. Such is the nature of people
as a system.
Coalition of the Willing: http://coalitionofthewilling.org.uk/read-the-script/
Rational Repentance: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3rc/rational_repentance/
African Einstein
http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/20/neil_turok/
Bryan West •
Permaculture Research Institute (http://permaculture.org.au/) has established a master plan that leverages off the notion of scalability, and marries the money and interest of the few with the context and needs of the many (well, that is my take on it). Worth a read.
The Crop Circle (www.crop-circle.org) where in a town of 8000 we have maybe 100 or so families who regularly meet to swap our surplus produce, compost, seeds, tools, time and most importantly ideas. In the 2 or 3 years since it has been going, there has been a tremendous shift in the ‘conversation’ within the town. Also, since many professional folk here are quite transient, they have taken the idea to their new communities and started it anew.
Community Connections (www.community-connections.com.au) provides VoIP telephone services at competitive rates, but whereas telecomms might spend a heap on advertising to get subscribers, we allow subscribers to nominate a local organisation who then receives a third of the subscription in perpetuity.
E-village (www.e-village.com.au) which we are launching soon. A virtual village, providing the benefits of economies of scales for all sorts of local organisations – webhosting, advertising and publicity etc. Fees from for-profit groups essentially subsidise the others.
T.A. since 1977 belonged to Hunger Project
The Hunger Project http://www.thp.org/
Video that explains the methodology: http://www.thp.org/node/558
Side Note Law Papers on Legal Systems
Mike Sessions •
Historical pattern repeated over millennia.
Phase:
1) selfishness and/or belief that one person is smarter/better than another [pride],
2) inexperienced and/or self-centered leadership [experienced are not interested in social leadership],
3) establishment of a system of justice and laws that favor leaders’ interests,
4) structural inequality [what it is referred to in academia] and unequal access to the law/judicial system,
5) divided community/society – weak and fractured,
6) collapse from within, revolution, or conquered by outsiders.
Great religions address these phases.
1) Love and humility as the foundational core
2) Leader as servant
3) Respect and honor for all living. Tashi Delek. God is no respecter…
4) All rights in common – not necessarily all things in common
5) Zion – unified society
6) Unconquerable. Nothing is impossible to those who are unified in mind and spirit.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Peter Senge and a number of other ecology-sensitive economists suggest a benign way to create a future that combines the best of enterprise intelligence and natural wisdom – in “Natural Capitalism”
The three principles used by Natural Capitalism Solutions are:
1. Buy time by using resources dramatically more productively.
This slows resource depletion, lessens pollution, and increases employment in meaningful jobs. It lowers costs for business and society, halts the degradation of the biosphere, makes it more profitable to employ people, and preserves vital living systems and social cohesion.
2. Redesign industrial processes and the delivery of products and services to do business as nature does, using such approaches as biomimicry and cradle to cradle.
This approach enables a wide array of materials to be produced with low energy flows, in processes that run on sunlight, emulating nature’s genius. It shifts to circular economies in which materials are reused, remanufactured and waste is eliminated.
3. Manage all institutions to be restorative of natural and human capital.
Such approaches enhance human well-being and enable the biosphere to produce more wealth from its intact communities and abundant ecosystem services and natural resources.
This is an interesting interview with L. Hunter Lovins, president of ‘Natural Capitalism Solutions’ and co-author of “Climate Capitalism”
Convincing Even the Skeptics to Go Green http://tinyurl.com/6fprpbr
Ilia Bider • @T.A. Your principles above sound right, the question is how to implement them considering that:
1. Nobody have built a “capitalist” system, it emerged as a winner of an evolutionary process in hard competition between different societies/cultures (countries)
2. As far as I know, there are no success stories of social re-engineering on a grand scale according to a rational design. A great experience of that kind was Russian revolution, the lessons learned being: (a) the result of social re-engineering can be contrary to the initial design, (b) the resulting system is not viable and looses to competitors.
IMHO, the radical total redesign is not a good approach. Better to find out emerging trends and re-enforce them with minimal efforts. Isn’t it what ST is about, e.g. positive feedback loops, leverage points etc.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Ilia
True, it is capitalism – but not the traditional version. Recent history – such as the economic meltdown – suggests that traditional capitalism is not working, but that doesn’t mean modifications will not work as well. Its like the search for a cure for AIDS – there are all kinds of new and improved versions being experimented with – but we don’t know which will provide a better cure unless we keep trying it out.
Wealth and class have always been aligned with a kind of military power and the willingness to use force. In order for any other new model to be implemented, some kind of significant external pressure must be exerted on the capitalist system in order to either persuade those that have the power to relinquish it or to take it away from them by force. There are too many people who enjoy subjugating other humans, whether consciously or unconsciously, for the system to go willingly.
The expansion of wealth in the west has been so significant over the past centuries that most westerners have no idea just how far there is to fall. I fear that whatever form that pressure comes in, and I believe it will come in the form of environmental collapse if nothing is done now to even modify capitalism, the ride down will be too chaotic for macro systems to be implemented.
The core of the problem with traditional capitalism is the addiction of the developed world – and thereby the world economy – to consumption. Any solution that does not address at its core the dependence of the world economy on rising levels of consumption will fail to address the environmental problems that come with it. We cannot simultaneously grow economically and consume less.
So the logic of Natural Capitalism would be to make consumption cleaner, thereby keeping the profitability of the system intact. Given the exponential population growth that we expect over the next century, this may, however, only a very short term solution – maybe for a decade until the environment recovers – but ultimately consumption – however clean – will only result in serious long term problems.
And this is just where Africa and Asia may teach the west how to survive, for these continents – though not prosperous – have been developing micro economies and communities for a long time. Perhaps those social and economic structures, combined with ecological science can bring a new model to bear.
Fabienne Salimi • “Evolution of our mindset” is the most important issue. To me it is not question of “change” but common and good sense.
We have let that our reason get corrupt by media, nationalism,…to believe that everything that we do is for money and accumulation of wealth by some people is acceptable.
If we just let that our conscious take control of our thought, words and deeds everything will be OK naturally.
Politicians, UN and the other national and international organisations tell us there are unsolvable financial complexities and the only way to cope with them is to take tax, salary, and any possible advantage of people and give it to the banks who continue to distribute the bonus among them and we just believe them!
It is not as difficult as they make us believe to:
- revaluate the assets and potentials of all nations,
- reset all debts to zero, establish a universal money or any other sort of abstract measure to circulate the different good with a common tool,
- revaluate the value of different works and resources
- globalise the human and work rights as well as commercial and financial rights
- plan for development of whole humanity and the best use of available resources
- plan for further research
Stephen Scott Wright • @Helene, it is obvious where its all heading. We need a free market, where all are actually free to participate in it. There is nothing wrong with the capitalist model..what is wrong are the players who are biasing it to their own ends and lack any moral or societal guidance. As far as leverage points there are U.N. ,Regional (E.U.) and National programs that already have funding authorized for them..what they lack IMHO is a common framework (tactical plan). Similarly there are Corporations who have sponsored their own initiatives in a variety of areas that might align with a common framework (tactics) to achieve a common goal (strategy). There are also numerous grassroot organizations who would likely buy into this. So if the group could flesh something out that has systemic validity, it would be a matter more of marketing and project management, to get positive change started…
T.A. Balasubramanian • Bryan
To quote Bertrand Russell [ my favorite philosopher ]
“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”
Fabienne Salimi • I agree with Bryan that:
“The question is how do we define, create, nurture and sustain freedom?”
Very often we meet people who talk about freedom and human right passionately and at the same time they defend/justify wars, death sentence and punishment by prison. How it can happen? In my opinion this can happen because they consider the person who is categorised as “enemy” or “criminal” as an entire “human”. So, they are not bothered if the human right is not applied to these people.
I have opened a discussion about recent BP major accident in Gulf of Mexico. I got more than 1000 passionate comment on the subject. I was amazed by the number of people who accused BP as representative of UK to come in America, exploit the American resources and show a careless attitude toward people and environment.
Many of these people did not even know and when they knew they did not care about the major accidents which caused by American companies elsewhere.
I like very much the following statement and I think we should work on it for all aspects of human life:
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” -Alvin Toffler
The social model of France is based on two core values:
- Proximité
- Mixité
France is divided to 99 departments in which the mayors have a great power. Cities and towns are also divided to area in which local sub-mayors have also some authority to improve the life of the citizens. The concept of “Proximité » facilitates communication of citizens with authorities. It encourages them to get active and involved in daily issues and concerns of the living area.
This can be done in universal scale too. I think we need a universal policy, leadership and commitment which define the main goals and objectives of humanity.
Then, implementation and management of these universal goals and objectives should be performed by the as small as possible/agreed area. For example if the Frenchs like to follow the same processes and procedures to implement these universal values it is OK.
On contrary if a region like Basque or Bretagne or Corse prefers another approach compatible by their culture, history and preferences then they should be able to do so.
We should welcome and celebrate “diversity” of cultures, languages and methods and facilitate their preservation as a part of humanity treasure.
The concept of “Mixité” believes that the different social category of people and professions should live together. Experience shows that always the quality of life of the poorer are lifted and not richer declined by this approach.
Poorer and richer should be mixed and touch each other. Their children can go to the same school and have the same lunch at canteen, the same holiday school trips and excursions, same possibility of learning sport and art, etc.
I like the French social model and I hope that the new greedy governing parties cannot destroy what Frenchs built during centuries. I do hope that world get inspired by this model and improve the actual living areas in this direction.
Ilia Bider • To move beyond blaming “capitalism”, here http://bit.ly/dPEoZD is a proposal for a leverage point. You can laugh at it 
) , or take it seriously 
, or come up with a better leverage point . Printed and respond with invitation
KK Aw • IIia,
H.G. Wells in The Brain, Organization of the Modern World said
“An immense, an ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today, a wealth of knowledge and suggestion that – systematically ordered and generally disseminated – would probably give this giant vision and direction and suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but the knowledge is still dispersed, unorganized, impotent in the face of adventurous violence and mass excitement”
Here the assumption is not just ideas, but using the wealth of knowledge to solve our difficulties. I agree with you that we need to find the people who can implement the solutions.
Stephen Scott Wright • @llia, Thanks for your ideas on a new system. My thoughts are as follows;
- The existing system will not dismantle itself..and its dismantlement can not be legislated. Any alternative system will have to be in parallel and in my opinion it must “out compete” the existing model. I think this is doable over the long term and in the mid term opportunity may present itself when there are economic crashes and devaluations. In order to take advantage of those opportunities..an alternative model must be up and working that meets the immediate needs of those population segments.
- Capitalism with a conscience is the only viable alternative model in that any new model must not be radically different, so existing participants and new entrants can understand and utilize equivalent infrastructure and practice. Existing legal frameworks would allow for a new and improved version of capitalism whereas other models would be unsupported.
- I think the Internet and WWW as host for a new economic paradigm represent the most important tool and leverage point for this alternative economic model. A global bazaar of products, skills and ideas with physical in country presence are characteristics of this new model. I think the age old system of “Barter” could be combined to form a Global Humanity Exchange of information, ideas, products, skills and physical assets such as land, where this new market assigns valuations based upon particpants demand..similar to the way a stock exchange works. This new “Market Place” could be run with an applied Ethos and should represent an alternative venue for all to purchase and sell. Of course country and region specific domain filtering will be required to ensure that what is purchased and sold doesn not run afoul of local law…but this too over time would be a leverage point for promoting human rights, rule of law and protection of assets..wherin countries that do not support this limit their own opportunities.
Probably not radical enough for some, but it is in the right direction..
T.A. Balasubramanian • Stephen
“Capitalism with a conscience is the only viable alternative model”
I agree – but the path to conscience is blocked with one big rock – the profit motive.
How does capitalism get away from the profit motive?
Capitalist corporations do not aim at creating employment; they employ people (as few and as cheaply as possible) to make profits. Health care companies are not in business to save lives; they provide health care to make profits. Oil companies do not seek to protect the environment except to meet regulations or to protect their public image. Full employment, affordable medicine, and a healthy environment may, under certain circumstances, turn out to be the by-products of market processes, but such welcome social outcomes cannot be guaranteed by the profit principle alone.
The world economy is alive today because of the flow of financial capital and the nexus between politicians and the business class. The balance of advantage has swung so far in favor of financial capital that it is often said that multinational corporations and international financial markets have somehow supplanted or impinged on the sovereignty of the state. That is not the case. States remain sovereign. They wield legal powers that no individual or corporation can possess. And states do not pay much attention to the UN or its resolutions, as you rightly point out.
Although governments retain the power to interfere in the economy, they have become increasingly subject to the forces of global competition. If a government imposes conditions that are unfavorable to capital, capital will seek to escape. Conversely, if a government keeps down wages and provides incentives for favored businesses it can foster the accumulation of capital. Hence the convenient nexus between politicians and business. This is the skeletal system of capitalism as it stands today.
So the global capitalist system consists of many sovereign states, each with its own policies, but each subject to international competition not only for trade but also for capital. This is one of the features that makes the system so complicated: Although we can speak of a global regime in economic and financial matters there is no global regime in politics. Each state has its own regime.
There is a widespread belief that capitalism is somehow associated with democracy in politics. It is a historical fact that the countries that constitute the center of the global capitalist system are democratic but the same is not true of all the capitalist countries that lie on the periphery. In fact, many claim that some kind of dictatorship is needed to get economic development going.
Economic development requires the accumulation of capital and that, in turn, requires low wages and high savings rates. This is more easily accomplished under an autocratic government that is capable of imposing its will on the people than a democratic one that is responsive to the wishes of the electorate.
So capitalism with a conscience – yes – but who is going to put the conscience back into the system?
Stephen Scott Wright • High T.A., I think that in the model that I proposed…the conscience is put into it by the free access to all, in that if there is such a thing as a commonly held set of moral values it will be reflected in the eavailability of the economic model. Todays model denies participation and influence to the majority..and the only commonly held ethos of the minority ..profit is reinforced. Note that I said the new model would have to “out compete” the old and I think that is healthy. There are tremendous inefficiencies in the current model and it is limited to products and intangible abstractions in its valuations. If there were no irrational exuberance and speculation, if only tangible products produced in a morally responsible way and ethical representation of people and ideas were traded…that capitalized on efficiences inherent to a better use of resources…then it will be a huge improvement over what we have. Personally I am open to new ideas…that are realistic/pragmatic..that respect peoples wishes/soveriegnty and I think most people would be.
Bruce Nappi • @Ilia, I think your idea is very sound. But unfortunately, it’s not new. I say unfortunately, because there have been attempts to do this in the past. The ones I have been involved with have “mostly” failed.
In the early days of the SBIR program (U.S. Small Business Innovative Research), a number of “private” SBIR organizations were set up to try to achieve what you describe. One of these asked private companies for a list of needs. They then had individuals submit proposals in standard SBIR format for the companies to review. Another category was “incubator” firms. A third was invention marketing companies. A fourth was the venture capital / angel investor groups themselves.
What caused these efforts to fail was the same major roadblock your plan will face. It’s one word in your Proposal item 2: “…connecting them to people who CAN implement them.” All of the programs I mentioned did that well. What they found, over and over again, was the companies that COULD implement the ideas, and were obviously appropriate to do it, refused to take the risk of introducing any new ideas that a. challenged their existing approach, or b. were sufficiently novel that a market success for their company was uncertain. This is what we call the LEGACY problem. If you have some good ideas to defeat that, please count me in as a supporter.
Ilia Bider • @Stephen, sorry for not understanding your message right. I agree that “devils are in the details”. No, I do not have a detailed plan. I thought we are in the phase of suggesting and debating possible leverage points, though we have skipped stakeholder analysis. As far as my proposal at http://bit.ly/dPEoZD is concerned, it needs some father development, and then lobbying.
@Bruce, I am not claiming the originality, similar kind of ideas should have entered many heads. However, I do not agree that such ideas were properly tested. For example, “They then had individuals submit proposals in standard SBIR format for the companies to review”, this is not an “active” handling in my view, but a bit beefed up old “passive” one. The active agents that I think about are not the same people that have ideas, they are the ones that can understand “great” ideas of others (not just immediate needs of the companies) and be able to do real lobbying for them. As far as “angels” are concerned, those that I have met looked more like consultants that help others to navigate in the “old” system, but it might just be my bad luck. There is a lot of activities around the “old system”, like consultant writing grants and proposals, which makes it even more meaningless.
As far as your last paragraph is concerned, it might belong to the area of not teaching the old guys a new dance. Probably, setting a new company should be considered as the best way of implementing a new idea, but as I said before, I have no details for the moment to suggest.
I had this idea in my head for quite a while. However, I have not given it much thought until I got the book of Sergeev (whom I respect very much) where he and his colleagues debated similar ideas seriously from different perspectives. As I pointed out, the book is in Russian, but I will check whether materials on this particular topic where published somewhere in English. If they were, I will come back with the link.
Thanks for the debate. I hope we can have other suggestions for leverage points to continue in a positive direction in this thread
Helene Finidori [Giraud] • @David, Bryan, Stephen, TA, Ilia & all
Your further posts on conscious capitalism, economy and free markets generated the following thoughts:
@Ilia re improving capitalism versus something new – well I think you and TA are not saying very different things: let capitalism morph itself -by reinforcing good trends- for the best in an improved form… or become something else… we will wake up one day and decide that the capitalist era is over –like geologists are now debating if we have left the Holocene time to enter the Antropocene time… Is the word important? I think we all agree that change will hopefully come “peacefully” from the inside and not as the result of some “engineered” or forced upon process…
@David. You mention “the Globalist idea of viewing society through an economic prism”. This made me wonder: what is economy actually? The etymological and original sense derived from ancient Greek is “management of the household”… which later gave “effective management of the resources”. There’s a French expression: “en bon père de famille” which literally means when applied to management and investment: “managing and investing as a good father/head of household”. This is used in legal documents, translated in English as “with reasonable and due care”.
So the current economic prism does not reflect what constitutes the definition, the foundation and the purpose of Economy which is to “well manage the household and the resources, with reasonable and due care”…
So doesn’t the question become: how to bring back conscience and reasonable due care to economics, the free market and business?
Who are the custodians of this reasonable due care in business and on the free market, who in the ensures that business and the free market ensures the care and the development of the household (society): their economic role if this is not the role of a government?
@TA. You wrote Economic requirement requires accumulation of capital. I would say economic development requires stable “investment” in productive activity and infrastructure, it requires long term capital, stable currencies, and stable resource markets, not volatile capital that will rush from one good deal to another good deal. That’s the big contradiction. Economic development requires reasonable due care, arbitrages made on actual anticipations of outcome long term, freedom of investing your money in what you think is the best possible project, not freedom of taking advantage of unbalances and time adjustments with automated transactions based on micro variations that can be fabricated/influenced by mass communication. Accumulation of capital for economic development is good. Accumulation of capital for speculation is bad and will blow the system up…
-speculative spot transactions based on taking advantage of variation, round trips in seconds that do not reflect conscious long term strategic choices
-possibility to do all this on credit
-rain making notation agencies
-investment banks who work on both ends
-derivatives and finance innovation of which nobody understands anything, hiding risk, volatility
Etc…
@Ila said, public companies don’t have owners any more. The whole process is dehumanized. “Old” capitalism was based on ownership. Privately owned company’s shareholders and management can engage in a dialogue with stakeholder and implement long term plans and development based on conscience and care… What about public companies? The ones who own the global power and put governments and currencies in competition and are own by a disseminated public who doesn’t even know what they actually own?
So I ask several questions:
-What if financial transactions at least on national debts and currencies if not linked to actual import/export were taxed in proportion inverse of time held, in and out, and tax used to finance development, infrastructure, health… all long term investments no one wants to fund? Re some kind of Tobin tax –
-What if you prohibit any financial product that is not directly linkable to what it is supposed to be a share/stake of, and whose financial mechanism is not immediately understandable by the average retiree? –What if pushing into debt was punished like pushing into drugs (drug dealing)
-What happens if boards and managements decide to stand up and stop publishing monthly; quarterly etc… forecasts, but instead long term strategies and investment plans, and stop belly dancing in front of analysts and fund managers? Many, big companies, together, at the same time… A civic disobedience of those who really have a stake in the real economy?…
There needs to be stuff done at all levels. Who can help get the traction to pull this off?
If we manage that, and add some efforts towards intelligent consumption and production on craddle to craddle principles, and caring for the people, we may be able to ensure the survival and more balanced development of the world economy?
Fabienne Salimi • I was just thinking why we should look for a “Revolutionary thinking”?
Revolution is for what is fundamentally wrong and must be overhauled. I don’t think that human society is so dysfunctional that we need to destroy what we have now to build a new one.
We should just remove the blockage of system and associated processes.
We should remove the “dishonest” people and regulations from power and let system get alive and functional with sunlight of transparency and fresh air for realisation of new ideas.
We need a “reform” rather than “revolution” to adapt the past system for present and future.
Helene
@Ilia. Unfortunately, p56 of Sergeev was a bit difficult for me to understand but I think I got it with your explanation:
The proponents of honest market system -those with conscience and due caring- must apply market pressure on the dishonest market system so that the moral principles are reestablished -that’s what we are seing now at play at the consumer/stakeholder level with the help of communication and social networks, demanding more accountability from corporations and denouncing what they deem as unacceptable at the offering/production level as well as the governance and management level, and what that I tried to explore with the managements pushing back with their BOD, against the finance intermediaries. And in this fits your concept of idea market as a positively reinforcing pressure.
This can happen with limited regulation on the “real economy” market because those who apply the pressure can weigh on the market. On the finance/resource market, I would say this is probably not enough, because those who want to apply more positive pressure are external to the market, because the negative pressure is embedded in [computer] systems with a total loss of control and accountability (automated transaction orders, derivatives so complicated that their initial purpose and mechanism is lost/hidden to the market, computer programs to “beat” the system; “self fulfilling” information…), and some border fraudulent behaviors have become the norm. I cannot see how these behaviors can stop under market pressure, because there are very limited means of pressure other than the ones that need to be enforced: tax, restriction, law, jail…
@Fabienne: I see only two ways to ‘remove the disonest’: jail (=law & regulation) or revolution… It’s probably not this type of revolution that Ban had in mind…
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
So let me reiterate what I said. As proposed presently, Natural Capitalism is an interim possible solution – as even the proponents admit – and the only fair deal model we know of today is socialism. Which is why I had added:
… but the rate at which socialist movements have been gaining ground is too slow. It is unlikely that a socialist movement from below can abolish capitalism in time; the more likely outcome will be a fascist and repressive regulation of production from above which maintains the privileges of those who are in power today.
We are not living in a dream world where every human being gets justice and equality, Helene. That is never going to happen – a eutopia again!
The truth is that the world as a global economic system exists in a state of extreme inequality between the rich and the poor. This inequality is mediated by power – a combination of military hegemony and the concentration of wealth in the hands of just 300 families and individuals.
To ideally stabilize and regulate a truly global economy, we need some global system of political decision making – a socialist system of planned production. In short, we need a global society to support our global economy.
A global society does not mean a global state. To abolish the existence of states is neither feasible nor desirable; but insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.
Interestingly, the greatest opposition to this idea is coming from the United States, which, as the sole remaining superpower, is unwilling to subordinate itself to any international authority.
The United States faces a crisis of identity: Does it want to be a solitary superpower or the leader of the free world? The two roles could be blurred as long as the free world was confronting an “evil empire,” but the choice now presents itself in much starker terms. Unfortunately we have not even started to consider it.
The popular inclination in the United States is to go it alone and ignore the rest of the world, but that would deprive the world of the leadership it so badly needs. Isolationism could be justified only if the market fundamentalists were right and the global economy could sustain itself without a global society.
The alternative is for the United States to forge an alliance with like-minded nations to establish the laws and institutions that are necessary to the preservation of peace, freedom, prosperity, and stability. What these laws and institutions are cannot be decided once and for all; what we need is to set in motion a cooperative, iterative process that defines the open society ideal – a process in which we openly admit the imperfections of the global capitalist system and try to learn from our mistakes.
As I said, Natural Capitalism is one way to make those corrections – but it is not a permanent solution.
David Hawk • Hi Helene (perhaps of Troy?), nice to see that you continue to fight the valiant fight, and cause trouble for would-be thought leaders. You do so in your highly charming manner, that I can’t do, but do appreciate your manner of doing.
Relative to your initial question – I think there is little hope in looking to anything in World Economic Forum personalities (functionaries or speakers), for much of any value to suggest much about changing human direction. The same for the United Nations. Maybe I can’t see half full glasses anymore.
Example: In 1991 I staged a Stockholm Symposium, that ended up as an alternative to the Davos meeting, where sixty CEO’s were granted admission to the Grand Hotel meeting, but only it they promised to give lecture of limited bullshit, on what they really felt about “things.” No one was allowed to comfortably sit there and listen to would-be thought leaders, affectionately know as “conference speakers.” It seemed to go very well, especially in terms of what was learned from the most thoughtless in attempting to speak and answer questions from those with thoughts. An additional value was that WEF people became upset about the symposium, and perceived it to be in competition for their rightful place atop the best bullshit of the year.
In 2006 WEF people visited me to see if I’d attend a board meeting (perhaps they were concerned with it being a bored meeting) in Dalian, China to discuss the approach we had tried in Stockholm where speakers were limited to participants. Also, and I suspected of greater importance, they wanted thoughts on why the Chinese firms weren’t bothering with the Davos meetings. The conclusion: they perhaps were, are and will continue to be fifteen years too late in what they do. This includes the: organizers, speakers and attendees.
The UN is probably too late as well, but perhaps moving at less than half the speed.
Relative to responses to your question; especially the pretty long and passionate ones like Stephen’s: I ran two of his postings, relative to his depiction of the current situation, and his way out of it, by a noted economist friend. He pointed out that it was fantastic, but if only Stephen would agree to substitute Adam Smiths’ spiritual thoughts on the economics of self as a replacement to Stephen’s characterization of a “universal God.” If so, then Stephen would be giving the exact same recipe to that given by many Economic Nobel Prize winners over the years. They surly knew the problem. they certainly know the solution, but they only want the power to implement it. Maybe that is how we got here in the first place. There is something similar to all this that happened in the saga of how Forrester, Meadows and their MIT allies helped dissipate the initial high quality and ambiguous concerns of the Club of Rome: the problem was clear (to them) – the solution was clearer (to them, especially if the Club came up with research funding) – and the doing could happen quickly (once the funds arrive). The nice thing was the Club members could all go back home and do what they preferred doing, which is what humans always do.
We use the same method of discover activities like recycling the things that never should have been, but now have a psychological means to continue to do so. It simply feels good, and it sells even better.
Socrates, et.al., suffer from not quite understanding the fundamental human importance of timing: i.e., your being able to market your solution before the larger situation can be appreciated. Socrates never learned the case study approach to business success.
@Eero posted at the very beginning of the discussion, because totally in the scope of the new market models to further develop:
T.A. Balasubramanian • One of the major ’sinks’ of capitalism is skewed military expenditure on a vast scale – as can be seen from this piece that highlights US military spending.
http://pinione.blogspot.com/2010/10/japan-has-sangyo-seisaku-while-america.html
In the new book by Chalmers Johnson, ‘Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope,’ the former CIA analyst presents a strong argument against the American laissez-faire economic model and reveals that the United States through its support of a permanent arms industry has supported its own “industrial policy” very similar to the Japanese model of sangyo seisaku.
“Contrary to the political rhetoric of supporting an unconstrained market guided by laissez-faire and capitalism, American political leaders of both political parties have supported a Pentagon run industrial policy and an elaborate system of military Keynesianism. The determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it does not contribute to either production or consumption is now proving to be a form of slow economic suicide.”
Some of the figures:
US military spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has reached approximately $1 trillion since 2001, not including the cost of the surge of 30,000 troops.
In fiscal year 2009 (budget of $663 billion), federal government outlays on the military were 17% of all outlays.
Meanwhile, energy, resource conservation, and the environment accounted for only 1% of federal outlays, while education, training, and social services made up only 2%.
Military spending is therefore eight to seventeen times as high as federal education- and energy-related spending.
Baker concluded: “It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment”
The piece ends bluntly:
Until more Americans begin to realize the negative effects of military Keynesianism and the flawed economic model laissez-faire capitalism, the continued slow demise of America as a superpower will continue.
UN Open Engagement
http://www.unglobalpulse.org/blog/video-thursdays-open-un-panels
Below are my notes from the two panel sessions.
Panel I
Real-time field operations
Is real-time citizen engagement the engine of relief and development in the 21st century?
Recent experiences in both disaster relief and ongoing development efforts show that there is a potential to leverage real-time information and open collaboration for operational efforts. There are powerful—and dependent—connections between emerging technologies and communities. The panel will explore how new tools and approaches are already changing facts on the ground.
Panelists:
• Ms. Corinne Woods, Director, United Nations Millennium Campaign
• Ms. Katrin Verclas, Co-founder and Editor, MobileActive.org
• Mr. Sean Gourley, Research Fellow, Oxford University
• Mr. Jihad Abdalla, Emergency Officer and GIS focal point, Office of Emergency Programmes, UNICEF
• Mr. Nigel Snoad, Senior Information Management Officer, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA
Dynamics are Shifting
Members of the panel explained that dynamics are shifting between citizens and government as individuals and groups have the ability to communicate real-time, on the ground and quickly develop a cohesive voice. Citizens are more empowered to advocate for what they want and need and to take action. Given communication technologies, they’re more at the center of political dialogue and it’s now easier for citizens to build political will and reach a flash point where things begin to change. Interestingly, events in Egypt were happening real-time during the panel session: case in point.
In order to get coherent outcomes from a complex environment where there are multiple information flows and multiple players, new forms of collaboration and community engagement are emerging. Some of the building blocks of this engagement are common goals & standards, explicit ways of sharing information, and shared situational awareness (sense-making).
Projects like Global Pulse are creating conditions for this collaboration and data collection on the ground and, at the same time, understanding patterns in the data and developing models that can lead to strategic decisions that help the most vulnerable.
Culture of Innovation
Giving examples like the Ushahidi Project, the panel heralded a culture of innovation in the world of relief and development. Small clusters of people and social enterprise are circumventing large institutions and using new technology to do some “amazing things.”
A culture of innovation is also arising in the UN system (UN Global Pulse, UNICEF Innovation, UNDP Innovation Fund, World Bank Innovation). These are all “good bacteria” that will spread throughout the system. To support innovation we need more agile, fluid, adaptive project management.
One member of the panel warned that the UN would need evidence that this citizen engagement could contribute to development outcomes at scale before investing significant resources in innovation. (By that time, might the UN be irrelevant?) Others responded that we need a portfolio approach to balance risk and permission to experiment (“If it works let’s do it; don’t be shy”). And, we need to engage with technology because that in itself will change the UN system rapidly to adapt to today’s realities.
Panel II
Institutions in the age of real-time
How must local, national and global institutions adapt to succeed in the real-time world?
Real-time technologies and strategies of openness represent both an opportunity and a profound threat to how institutions and governments organize themselves to deliver services in the 21st century. Increasingly, individuals are empowered to interact directly with one another, challenging the hierarchical structures and processes of traditional institutions. However for organizations that are able to harness the untapped potential of global communities in real-time, the possibilities are mind-blowing.
Panelists
• Dr. Robert Orr, Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning, United Nations
• Mr. Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU
• Mr. Richard Tyson, Co-founder and Principal, Helsinki Group
• Mr. Zia Khan, Vice President, Strategy and Evaluation, Rockefeller Foundation
• Mr. Carne Ross, Founder, Independent Diplomat
Global Action Networks
The panel named a shift in power – moving away from institutions and towards networks and knowledge that flow into structures to get things done. These global action networks are new supra-structures that cluster around issues like climate change, global health, food, etc. The global issue is the organizing principle of these networks (not member states.) The UN has the brand and credibility to be the convenor of these networks and play a critical role to address global issues. (The UN Global Compact is an example of an action network, the humanitarian cluster system (established by IASC) is another.)
Adaptive Organizations
In a world where the amount of information keeps doubling and where work gets done virtually by a distributed network of individuals and teams, panelists warned that institutions need to organize at scale and learn to be innovative, resilient, and adaptive as data shifts on the ground. Teams need the ability to convene quickly around emerging issues. This means giving autonomy and training to front-line employees, tolerating errors of commission from action (not omission), and assuming that information is moving at real-time with public access to information (so teams are given all information). This emerging form of organization works because teams have common values (and understand the strategic intent of the organization) so they can make aligned decisions on their own and coordinate them with the larger system.
Transitional Structures
One panelist let us know that the UN is actively promoting and incubating transitional, agile process that will create new institutional structures and forms that use technology to speed up our ability to know what’s happening and to act quickly.
This will move the UN more toward being an adaptive, learning organization. Global Pulse, for example, is increasing the prospect that shared information will cross traditional lines (across bureaucracies) by convening relevant actors around a problem (e.g. how data will be gathered and used by five food organizations), resolving the core issues, and creating a new local structure that uses real-time data to inform response.
Transitional structures are empowered to do more in the field – increasing capacity for cooperation, coordination, and alignment. Of course, building trust through working together is key to the success of these efforts. In order for the institution to adapt, it’s not just about changing the rules… rituals and culture must also adapt.
Redefining the UN
Transitional structures could organically lead to new relationships new rituals, and new ways of working that will redefine the UN over time and maintain its relevance. And, one panelist urged a more radical view that the UN structure is centered around member states and ignoring today’s realities of influential, non-state actors who cause 80% of conflicts. He called for a restructuring of the UN – a new meeting in San Francisco (1948 + 65) to rebuild the UN based on the full spectrum of players: global action networks, non-state actors and governments.
V3W
I have a few insights in business ontology and current commitment to the V3W (Velocity in the Third Wave) notion that may be a cooperative collaborative opportunity. I am committed to a global communitarian distributive open crowd sourcing movement. The distinction that I also offer is imperative is the “privacy of autonomy” coordinating trust in promises within permanent human and business concerns. If information is doubling in the collective “Noosphere” every 24 months and we are already immersed in “overload in creative collapsing opportunities at the edge of chaos.” The key in my assessment is simplification of coordination of autonomous human commitment in dynamic domains of human concerns empowering autonomy within communitarian open space. The future is all about gathering human trust and harnessing our expertise capacities in rapidly formed networks in grounding effective actions to our mutual communitarian concerns. Thanks patric
Natural Capitalism
Peter Senge and a number of other ecology-sensitive economists suggest a benign way to create a future that combines the best of enterprise intelligence and natural wisdom – in “Natural Capitalism”
The three principles used by Natural Capitalism Solutions are:
1. Buy time by using resources dramatically more productively.
This slows resource depletion, lessens pollution, and increases employment in meaningful jobs. It lowers costs for business and society, halts the degradation of the biosphere, makes it more profitable to employ people, and preserves vital living systems and social cohesion.
2. Redesign industrial processes and the delivery of products and services to do business as nature does, using such approaches as biomimicry and cradle to cradle.
This approach enables a wide array of materials to be produced with low energy flows, in processes that run on sunlight, emulating nature’s genius. It shifts to circular economies in which materials are reused, remanufactured and waste is eliminated.
3. Manage all institutions to be restorative of natural and human capital.
Such approaches enhance human well-being and enable the biosphere to produce more wealth from its intact communities and abundant ecosystem services and natural resources.
This is an interesting interview with L. Hunter Lovins, president of ‘Natural Capitalism Solutions’ and co-author of “Climate Capitalism”
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Convincing Even the Skeptics to Go Green
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Ilia – ”find out emerging trends and re-enforce them with minimal efforts…”
Well, that’s what the ‘Natural’ part of Natural Capitalism is advocating! Nothing radical in the approach.
Reply to Ilia - True, it is capitalism – but not the traditional version. Recent history – such as the economic meltdown – suggests that traditional capitalism is not working, but that doesn’t mean modifications will not work as well. Its like the search for a cure for AIDS – there are all kinds of new and improved versions being experimented with – but we don’t know which will provide a better cure unless we keep trying it out.
Wealth and class have always been aligned with a kind of military power and the willingness to use force. In order for any other new model to be implemented, some kind of significant external pressure must be exerted on the capitalist system in order to either persuade those that have the power to relinquish it or to take it away from them by force. There are too many people who enjoy subjugating other humans, whether consciously or unconsciously, for the system to go willingly.
The expansion of wealth in the west has been so significant over the past centuries that most westerners have no idea just how far there is to fall. I fear that whatever form that pressure comes in, and I believe it will come in the form of environmental collapse if nothing is done now to even modify capitalism, the ride down will be too chaotic for macro systems to be implemented.
The core of the problem with traditional capitalism is the addiction of the developed world – and thereby the world economy – to consumption. Any solution that does not address at its core the dependence of the world economy on rising levels of consumption will fail to address the environmental problems that come with it. We cannot simultaneously grow economically and consume less.
So the logic of Natural Capitalism would be to make consumption cleaner, thereby keeping the profitability of the system intact. Given the exponential population growth that we expect over the next century, this may, however, only a very short term solution – maybe for a decade until the environment recovers – but ultimately consumption – however clean – will only result in serious long term problems.
And this is just where Africa and Asia may teach the west how to survive, for these continents – though not prosperous – have been developing micro economies and communities for a long time. Perhaps those social and economic structures, combined with ecological science can bring a new model to bear.
Capitalism – Success at what cost?
“Capitalism seeks to optimise wealth for the few and in that regard it would be considered very successful.”
Successful indeed – but only for those who accumulate the wealth. And success at what cost to the planet? At what cost to those who are ‘toiling slaves’ in the capitalist system, outside the elite few at the top?
One of the drivers of capitalism is greed – the desire to maximize profit regardless of consequences. Capitalism has driven itself into the present state of disrepute because it sponsors consumerism as the engine of profit-making – and consumerism – driven my advertising – makes people want stuff they don’t really need, but goes to satisfy their aspirational greed.
On the other hand, the historic hallmarks of humanity (complex language, architecture, art) could not have been achieved by greed alone. Historically, I think cooperation and reciprocity – which exist in human society outside the purview of capitalism – have served us better. Although there will always be a necessary kernel of self interest in everyone, unadulterated greed – which is what capitalism epitomizes – is only one tactic for survival and evolution of civilization.
The way to transition out of capitalism is to to make the capitalist economy responsible for the regeneration of the resources that are unthinkingly – and systematically – consumed from the ‘free wealth’ of the planet. That’s where Natural Capitalism comes in – if consumerism has to continue, it can only do so by becoming ‘clean’ and green.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Bryan
To quote Bertrand Russell [ my favorite philosopher ]
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Stephen
“Capitalism with a conscience is the only viable alternative model”
I agree – but the path to conscience is blocked with one big rock – the profit motive.
How does capitalism get away from the profit motive?
Capitalist corporations do not aim at creating employment; they employ people (as few and as cheaply as possible) to make profits. Health care companies are not in business to save lives; they provide health care to make profits. Oil companies do not seek to protect the environment except to meet regulations or to protect their public image. Full employment, affordable medicine, and a healthy environment may, under certain circumstances, turn out to be the by-products of market processes, but such welcome social outcomes cannot be guaranteed by the profit principle alone.
The world economy is alive today because of the flow of financial capital and the nexus between politicians and the business class. The balance of advantage has swung so far in favor of financial capital that it is often said that multinational corporations and international financial markets have somehow supplanted or impinged on the sovereignty of the state. That is not the case. States remain sovereign. They wield legal powers that no individual or corporation can possess. And states do not pay much attention to the UN or its resolutions, as you rightly point out.
Although governments retain the power to interfere in the economy, they have become increasingly subject to the forces of global competition. If a government imposes conditions that are unfavorable to capital, capital will seek to escape. Conversely, if a government keeps down wages and provides incentives for favored businesses it can foster the accumulation of capital. Hence the convenient nexus between politicians and business. This is the skeletal system of capitalism as it stands today.
So the global capitalist system consists of many sovereign states, each with its own policies, but each subject to international competition not only for trade but also for capital. This is one of the features that makes the system so complicated: Although we can speak of a global regime in economic and financial matters there is no global regime in politics. Each state has its own regime.
There is a widespread belief that capitalism is somehow associated with democracy in politics. It is a historical fact that the countries that constitute the center of the global capitalist system are democratic but the same is not true of all the capitalist countries that lie on the periphery. In fact, many claim that some kind of dictatorship is needed to get economic development going.
Economic development requires the accumulation of capital and that, in turn, requires low wages and high savings rates. This is more easily accomplished under an autocratic government that is capable of imposing its will on the people than a democratic one that is responsive to the wishes of the electorate.
So capitalism with a conscience – yes – but who is going to put the conscience back into the system?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
The safeguard against world totalitarianism is built-in, I think, because of the diversity of the planet. Against regional dictatorships, maybe there is none. And in some ways, many regions are better off under autocrats because of the imbalance of world power.
I also think the ecological limits of our planet constitute a limit for capitalism which cannot be integrated into the capitalist system. The one-dimensional criterion of money is not able to navigate the economy through the multi-dimensional limitations of the earth’s resources: exhaustion of fossil fuels, global warming, overfishing of the oceans, destruction of biological variety, etc.
Traditional capitalism needs growth, while a sustainable economy has to settle down to a no-growth steady state. Capitalism simply does not have the institutional framework needed to govern world wide production so that it stays within our planet’s ecological limits. Those who are willing to go closer to the brink can outcompete those who are more far-sighted. Bush’s energy policy is a good example here: the US is trying to make up in ecological recklessness what it lacks in expertise regarding “green” technologies.
So what can we expect?
Capitalism has proven very resilient and it is impossible to know how long it will be with us. It is much easier to see that the present constellation with the US at the pinnacle of a highly distorted world system has a limited life expectancy.
A more enlightened world capitalist system, which employs and exploits the vast labor reserves of the world rather than excluding them from the world economy, is possible in the next 20 years. However this change may not come about peacefully, We are sitting on a time bomb, and it is necessary to replace capitalism with a system of planned production to prevent this bomb from exploding. But the rate at which socialist movements have been gaining ground is too slow. It is unlikely that a socialist movement from below can abolish capitalism in time; the more likely outcome will be a fascist and repressive regulation of production from above which maintains the privileges of those who are in power today.
In the next 50 years, capitalism must be replaced by some type of planned
economy that includes the limits of natural growth, in order to prevent ecological catastrophe. Ideally this would be done by democratic and socialist planning, but it may also be attempted as a command economy from the top down directed by the present power elites, perhaps as continuation of the war economy of the next world war
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
So let me reiterate what I said. As proposed presently, Natural Capitalism is an interim possible solution – as even the proponents admit – and the only fair deal model we know of today is socialism. Which is why I had added:
… but the rate at which socialist movements have been gaining ground is too slow. It is unlikely that a socialist movement from below can abolish capitalism in time; the more likely outcome will be a fascist and repressive regulation of production from above which maintains the privileges of those who are in power today.
We are not living in a dream world where every human being gets justice and equality, Helene. That is never going to happen – a eutopia again!
The truth is that the world as a global economic system exists in a state of extreme inequality between the rich and the poor. This inequality is mediated by power – a combination of military hegemony and the concentration of wealth in the hands of just 300 families and individuals.
To ideally stabilize and regulate a truly global economy, we need some global system of political decision making – a socialist system of planned production. In short, we need a global society to support our global economy.
A global society does not mean a global state. To abolish the existence of states is neither feasible nor desirable; but insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.
Interestingly, the greatest opposition to this idea is coming from the United States, which, as the sole remaining superpower, is unwilling to subordinate itself to any international authority.
The United States faces a crisis of identity: Does it want to be a solitary superpower or the leader of the free world? The two roles could be blurred as long as the free world was confronting an “evil empire,” but the choice now presents itself in much starker terms. Unfortunately we have not even started to consider it.
The popular inclination in the United States is to go it alone and ignore the rest of the world, but that would deprive the world of the leadership it so badly needs. Isolationism could be justified only if the market fundamentalists were right and the global economy could sustain itself without a global society.
The alternative is for the United States to forge an alliance with like-minded nations to establish the laws and institutions that are necessary to the preservation of peace, freedom, prosperity, and stability. What these laws and institutions are cannot be decided once and for all; what we need is to set in motion a cooperative, iterative process that defines the open society ideal – a process in which we openly admit the imperfections of the global capitalist system and try to learn from our mistakes.
As I said, Natural Capitalism is one way to make those corrections – but it is not a permanent solution.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Hi David
It’s good to see you back in the middle of another Trojan War, as usual mediated by the irrepressible Helene!
But more to the point – what does your crystal ball say about capitalism’s future?
T.A. Balasubramanian • One of the major ’sinks’ of capitalism is skewed military expenditure on a vast scale – as can be seen from this piece that highlights US military spending.
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http://pinione.blogspot.com/2010/10/japan-has-sangyo-seisaku-while-america.html
In the new book by Chalmers Johnson, ‘Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope,’ the former CIA analyst presents a strong argument against the American laissez-faire economic model and reveals that the United States through its support of a permanent arms industry has supported its own “industrial policy” very similar to the Japanese model of sangyo seisaku.
“Contrary to the political rhetoric of supporting an unconstrained market guided by laissez-faire and capitalism, American political leaders of both political parties have supported a Pent n run industrial policy and an elaborate system of military Keynesianism. The determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it does not contribute to either production or consumption is now proving to be a form of slow economic suicide.”
Some of the figures:
US military spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has reached approximately $1 trillion since 2001, not including the cost of the surge of 30,000 troops.
In fiscal year 2009 (budget of $663 billion), federal government outlays on the military were 17% of all outlays.
Meanwhile, energy, resource conservation, and the environment accounted for only 1% of federal outlays, while education, training, and social services made up only 2%.
Military spending is therefore eight to seventeen times as high as federal education- and energy-related spending.
Baker concluded: “It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment”
The piece ends bluntly:
Until more Americans begin to realize the negative effects of military Keynesianism and the flawed economic model laissez-faire capitalism, the continued slow demise of America as a superpower will continue.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Whatever its deficiencies, western capitalism, it seems has become a binary star with government-sponsored socialism – and the combination runs too deep down in today’s economic DNA to be washed away by any magical substitutes.
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http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/12/capitalists-on-way-up-socialists-on-way.html
Capitalists On The Way Up; Socialists on Way Down. During Crises, Balance Always Tilts Toward Gov’t.
Many are finding it hard to make merry in the aftermath of this year’s financial crisis. Collateral damage from the crisis is extensive—unemployment is rising in the US, exporters are hurting in emerging markets, global stock markets are depressed, and each day seemingly brings new cries for government help from struggling industries.
Some see these effects as proof of capitalism’s failure. After all, this year saw the crumbling of a financial nucleus under its own weight, necessitating the US government to rescue the few straggling survivors. Capitalism, it’s argued, encourages greed and self-interests above the public good (Madoff is a “shining” example), and the solution is government and regulation.
But will larger government and more regulation help? History shows regulation does little to curb excesses. This is because excesses exist not because of the capitalist system, but because they are perpetuated by the participants. No amount of tinkering can regulate innate human characteristics.
There’s an old saying: “Everyone’s a capitalist on the way up and a socialist on the way down.” People want it all — to reap the benefits of free markets, but be protected against any downside. Capitalism won’t abide. And that’s a good thing. It’s a system of inherent checks and balances, which can be swift and brutal during the pruning process. In rough times, we seem willing to sacrifice free markets’ benefits for perceived security from this process (investors accepting 0% return on Treasuries is a recent example). Still, if free markets were restricted, what would happen to those checks? Subprime problems (or Madoff’s) were not revealed by regulators, but by markets. Note, politicians are human, too.
Capitalism and free markets are not ever-stable. They work precisely because they compel folks to take risks and seek to create excess value out of existing capital, in whatever form that might be. They’re examples of constant change and innovation. Change isn’t always comfortable—and much of it will fail—but when it moves society in a more efficient direction, society certainly becomes more profitable.
During crises, the balance always tilts toward government and away from capitalism. This doesn’t mean capitalism is done. But such things are always said in times like these. For s now we’ve applauded coordinated government efforts to provide monetary and fiscal liquidity and stimulus to the shocked financial system and to provide much-needed confidence.
We tend to draw the line, however, at government “ownership” of assets and/or direction of those funds. Government “solutions” can only carry the economy so far —it’s up to capitalism to drive real, sustained growth. That is, it’s up to the people who make an economy, not its turgid overseers.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
The Time article reminds me of Becky Fuller’s ‘cosmic accounting’ system.
In fact, there is an entire branch of ecology dedicated to accounting for nature, using the concept of ‘emergy’ – a term coined by ecologist Howard Odem.
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Emergy Evaluation
http://dieoff.org/page170.htm#hierarchy
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http://williambraham.net/?p=64
Emergy is Howard Odum’s neologism for embodied energy or energy memory, the total energy used in the production or preparation of a product or process, whether natural or artificial. Put the other way, it accounts for all the energy transformations along the path from the original energy inputs to the bio-geosphere: sunlight, geothermal heat, and tidal actions from the moon. Since every energy exchange or transformation involves some waste, emergy accounts for the all the energy degraded along the way.
For example, tracing the many energy transformations involved in the production of electricity from coal, beginning with the primeaval sunlight and plant photosynthesis, the long distillation and compression of those plants into coal, the mining and transportation, and then combustion of that coal in a power plant to produce and transmit electricity, results in an embodied energy of about 160,000 units of energy for each unit of electricity.
If you use that electricity to power a light bulb in a building, at something like 20% efficiency, then the energy degraded is 800,000 units to make a single unit of light. Compare that to the daylight that enters through a window, and the embodied energy is something like 10 or a 100 units for each unit of light, depending on windows and atmospheric condition.
In short, electricity is environmentally expensive because of the many wasteful steps in its production, but it also means that electricity has great value. If we look at this from the perspective of efficiency, we should use energy (or eat food) as low on the chain of transformations as possible. but if we understand this as a form of wealth, wouldn’t we try to accumulate it?
The difference seems to be in the difference between an individual ethic, which seeks the proper fit or efficiency of a particular decision or act, and a system or population ethic, which seeks to maximize the flow of power and the multiplicity of cascades of transformation.
Fully developed ecosystems seem to prosper precisely by developing staggered hierarchies of emergy and niches supporting populations at every level of those energy transformations. The carnivore at the top of the food chain doesn’t rule the system, despite the king-of-the-jungle metaphors, but rather is the symptom or benefactor of a richly complex eco-system.
Environmental accounting for human projects begins with the question of how industrial civilization fits into the total eco-system, and cannot be reduced to measures of individual proejct efficiencies?Is the relentless accumulation of wealth and power simply, ecologically “natural”? Is that civilization destined to the boom-and-bust, or predator-and-prey, cycles typical of every other comples ecosystem, and should that change our accounting of value?
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T.A. Balasubramanian • David
As always, your patient assimilation of arguments and your amazing connective and collective experiences are awe-inspiring. It’s hard to get anything past your lens!
None of us, I suspect would have had the privilege of attending Howard Odum’s lectures, so whatever we do gather is from a study of his body of work – which, as you rightly say, has generated another body of critics – of that time – who think he was “needing to invent unneeded concepts that allowed for unnecessary analysis.”
The popularity of many thermodynamic methods had waned since the 1980s, partly due to lack of adequate data and analysis techniques. Moreover, the extremely broad claims about the ability of these concepts to explain the behavior of all systems encountered much skepticism, and in most cases, have not been backed up by empirical evidence – mainly because there was no great pressure on anyone to do so.
My thinking is that Odum might just have been ahead of his time. In the 1980s, as far as I recall, the word ‘ecology’ and the entire on-going uproar that we are seeing today about global warming and the consequences thereof – was almost absent.
Today, the methods developed then by Odum and others are extremely relevant for evaluating life cycle aspects and sustainability, particularly since they can facilitate the linkage of concepts and models across multiple disciplines. The availability of life cycle inventory data, and other recent methodological advances can also overcome many previous shortcomings of these techniques.
T.A. Balasubramanian • I think one of the great disconnects today – between ecology and traditional science and engineering – is the same great disconnect we had been discussing in an earlier thread on the persistence of Industrial Age thinking in the 21st Century.
This is not to say that science and engineering are outdated – I think achieving sustainability requires a new generation of engineers and scientists that are trained to adopt a holistic view of processes as embedded in larger systems that have never been seriously considered before.
Engineering can no longer be performed in isolation, and must consider interactions among industrial processes and human and ecological systems. So the quest for sustainability requires research and educational innovation and advances not just in engineering, but also in many other disciplines, including management, economics, and sociology. Ultimately, this may be the most effective way of initiating the necessary long-term social, political, economic and technological changes.
And its not just scientists and engineers – in a way, the only hope we have is to get everybody on Spaceship Earth – as Bucky Fuller vividly put it – realize that they are holding tickets that have an expiry date.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Stephen
On bad behaviours – it may not be easy, in systems thinking terms to pre-determine what might constitute a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ behaviour – or – to be less judgemental – ‘undesirable action’.
Since environmental issues affect so many disciplines, cross-disciplinary interaction is essential for developing robust environmental policies. Quite often, failure to account for these interactions has often just shifted undesired impacts from one domain to another, and resulted in unexpected surprises from well-intentioned actions.
For example, replacing lead-based solder with bismuth-based solder seems to make sense since it would reduce the availability of a known toxic substance. However, the life cycle of bismuth indicates that encouraging its use may not reduce the availability of lead since lead is a byproduct of bismuth mining.
Another example is the “rebound effect” of improving energy efficiency. Improvements
in automobile efficiency may not result in a proportional decrease in fuel consumption, if the lower fuel cost encourages people to drive more.
The perfectly well-intended actions turn out to be undesirable – but we get to see it only in retrospect – unless we can bootstrap these cross-domain effects before they unfold.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Fabienne
I was pointing out that “traditional science and engineering” needs to embrace ecology to become more successful today – as opposed to the Industrial Era ‘tradition’.
From the Industrial Era, we inherited reductionism and mechanical thinking – but this has given rise to a set of conditions for which they are no longer suited. The very same skills of separation, analysis, and control that gave us the power to shape our environment are producing ecological and social crises in our outer world, and psychological and spiritual crises in our inner world. Both these crises grow out of our success in separating ourselves from the larger fabric of life.
The question science and engineering needs to ask is – ‘Why do we persist in fragmentation and piecemeal analysis as the world becomes more and more interconnected?’
T.A. Balasubramanian • “Little people need to learn to pressure the businesses. By the time corruption gets to government, governments can afford to ignore little people. I think of them as sort of a passivehaus, with styrofoam packed all around to insulate them from noise and from temperature changes.”
Mary, we need to get the little people de-addicted from the opium called ‘mass culture’ first. If we look at the history of capitalism, the universe of ‘little people’ consumers – fed by mass media like TV – and suckled by malls and credit peddlers – is, as you rightly say, insulated in their nurseries.
If the alternate to this nirvana is to be awake and aware, to be mindful of waste, to consume less and reproduce less ferociously – would the ‘little people’ care?
Note to Mary
Portland is an enlightened bubble – and I’d certainly like to know more about what you describe – The Declaration of Little People Independence? – and let’s build it into Nick’s vision for a Greener Tomorrow
Note to David Alman
In applying systems thinking to building an economic model, this analysis [by David Stroh] of the recent financial crisis may offer some valuable ideas on which principles of ST to invoke and where possible leverage points might lurk (of course this is a post facto analysis, so I’m only looking at the points of application of ST frameworks here – not the complete solution!)
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http://www.appliedsystemsthinking.com/supporting_documents/FinlCrisis.pdf
The article briefly introduces several principles for analyzing the root causes of complex problems; applies them to gain a deeper understanding of the financial crisis; and recommends high-leverage actions that political and business leaders can take to improve economic performance in sustainable ways.
In particular:
We can learn how to recognize and work more effectively with these dynamics by applying systems thinking to:
1. Illuminate the often non-obvious interdependencies among multiple elements that create such problems,
1. Increase awareness of how people unwittingly undermine their own efforts to achieve their stated aims, and
1. Point to high-leverage solutions that benefit the system as a whole.
Some of the deeper insights:
The Instability of Reinforcing Feedback
Two high-leverage strategies for avoiding the dependence on reinforcing feedback as an unending source of growth are:
>> Anticipate and prepare to address natural limits to any growth process. This means remembering that there are no free lunches and that promises of infinite growth inevitably prove false. This is spot on in a transition to Natural Capitalism.
>> Evaluate and manage growth in relation to independently meaningful goals rather than as an end in itself. We need to understand that money can enhance the quality of our lives by making it easier to realize our aspirations and express our values, but that the single-minded pursuit of money is ultimately deadening. Question the value of pure profit motivation.
Managing Unintended Consequences
>> The performance of human systems is significantly affected by people’s deeply held beliefs and intentions.With regard to our economic system, many political and business leaders believe that growth measured primarily in financial terms is inherently good and
that the ultimate goal of the system is to increase it.
>> This belief results in high pressure for growth, which our country has tended to achieve by stimulating borrowing instead of savings (at the individual, corporate, and national levels) as the basis for investment, and encouraging spending, especially on consumer products and a strong military.
>> we need to shift to a new paradigm designed to achieve sustainable development. This entails:
>>> Reallocating federal spending and redesigning tax incentives to develop renewable resources such as people and alternative energy
>>> Stimulating consumer and business spending based more on interest earned from savings than on interest paid for loans
Facilitating Continuous Learning
>> Decision makers should always ask themselves what might be the accidental impacts of the solutions
>> Since unexpected outcomes are so common, processes for learning and
correction should be built into all decisions.
>> Most actors in a human system unwittingly create or contribute to the very problems they are trying to solve
>> Changes in complex systems often require significant time and patience to
take hold
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Much of what is said here is commonsense – but ST is all about reiterating commonsense, which, as we know is rarely common!
The two systems diagrams in David Stroh’s analysis are the best visual representation I have seen so far on the US financial crisis – and there are literally hundreds of post mortems floating around!
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McKinsey - Capitalism for the Long Term
Two special features from McKinsey Quarterly:
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Capitalism for the Long Term
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/special_topics.aspx?stid=106&srid=17
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Investing in sustainability: An interview with Al Gore and David Blood
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Fritjof Capra - Finite Planet vs Unlimited Growth
This may help trigger some thoughts.
This systems visualization is of the core dilemma of today, viz. Finite Planet vs Unlimited Growth, showing the inter-relationships of the ’system’ and sub-systems – developed by Fritjof Capra, based on Plan B 3.0, by Lester Brown.
http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/capra_pb3.ppt
It includes ‘Global Capitalism’ [see slide 5] as one of the sub-systems – showing the dynamic links to the other six sub-systems. This could be a first-cut model for looking at the totality of capitalism today and the implications of changes on the related sub-systems.
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Unlimited Growth > Three Kinds
Population Growth
Economic Growth
Corporate Growth
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Sub-systems related to the three kinds of growth
> Global Capitalism
> Population Growth & Poverty
> Depletion of Resources
> Global Climate Change
> Peak Oil
> Threats to Food Security
> Failing States
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To see the context for this model, you can check http://www.earth-policy.org, which is the website of Lester Brown, an environmentalist and agricultural scientist.
Lester Brown’s brilliant fact-filled up-to-date book “World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse” is available free here:
http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/wotebook.pdf
Some of the themes he covers:
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PART I. A DETERIORATING FOUNDATION
> Falling Water Tables and Shrinking Harvests
> Eroding Soils and Expanding Deserts
> Rising Temperatures, Melting Ice, and Food Security
PART II. THE CONSEQUENCES
> The Emerging Politics of Food Scarcity
> Environmental Refugees: The Rising Tide
> Mounting Stresses, Failing States
PART III. THE RESPONSE—PLAN B
> Building an Energy-Efficient Global Economy
> Harnessing Wind, Solar, and Geothermal Energy
> Restoring the Economy’s Natural Support Systems
> Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population, and Rescuing Failing States
> Feeding Eight Billion
PART IV. WATCHING THE CLOCK
> Saving Civilization
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Some of Lester Brown’s observations on the world economy and its ills, and possible solutions:
https://www.earth-policy.org/books/wote/wotech13
The 42 references at the end of the chapter are useful to look at some of the related data on ecology, environment and policy issues. Some of it may be US-centric, but it is nevertheless a rich data source.
Kropotkin - The Cooperative Theory of Evolution
If capitalism – and its competitive ethos – has been justified on the basis of ’survival of the fittest’ it’s only because of the gladiatorial evolutionists and their sponsorship by the likes of Thomas Huxley.
In his book, ‘Bully for Brontosaurus,’ scientific historian Stephen Jay Gould devotes a chapter to presenting Peter Kropotkin’s views on biological evolution. Kropotkin is best known as a Russian revolutionary anarchist who believed in cooperative, rather than hierarchical and competitive, human relationships, and in devolving the power of the central state to local communities. It is less well known that his political views were based on a sophisticated view of evolution.
Kropotkin’s ideas on evolution contrasted sharply with those of Victorian English intellectuals such as Thomas Huxley, who stated: “. . . the animal world is about on a level of a gladiator’s show . . . whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.” To the Victorian Darwinists, this view of nature gave substance to Thomas Malthus’ belief in survival of the fittest, and bolstered the social Darwinist ethos of competition and unbridled private property rights.
Kropotkin could not accept Huxley’s “gladiatorial” Darwinism as a valid account of evolutionary biology, believing instead that the predominant way in which species achieve success is through cooperation, not competition. (Kropotkin acknowledged the prevalence of inter-species conflict; it was intra-species conflict with which he took exception.) He also believed that nature provides guidance for human morality through its emphasis on sociability and cooperation, not unrestrained competitiveness.
Rather than adopt a view of nature which supported his political thesis, as do most social philosophers, Kropotkin’s political views evolved from his scientific experience. As a young man, he spent five years as a naturalist studying the geology and zoology of eastern Russia. During this period, he observed that living things coped with the harsh Siberian environment primarily through cooperative behavior. In his book, Mutual Aid, written as a rebuttal to Huxley’s essay, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” Kropotkin stated: “During the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria . . . I failed to find–although I was eagerly looking for it–that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.”
Kropotkin abhorred the social vision of the gladiatorial evolutionists: “They conceive of the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another’s blood . . . They raise the ‘pitiless’ struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well.” Countering the social Darwinists, Kropotkin asserted, “If we . . . ask Nature: ‘who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization.” From his observation that mutual aid gives evolutionary advantage to living beings, he derived his political philosophy–a philosophy which stressed community and cooperative endeavor.
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To Mary
Love your off-beat posts … wherever did you think of that? I enjoy reading these annual Ig Nobel lists – reassuring to know that humanity is equally capable of evolving in reverse!
To Mary
Absolutely right … innovations get sparked on the edge of chaos, so to speak – sometimes literally!
Here’s one almost-Ig-Nobel story that I really enjoyed:
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Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make an incredible discovery
Wine makes superconductors better at their jobs. And apparently, it makes some scientists better at their jobs too
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To Vlad, Stephen, Marco
As to wine preferences – let’s ask Helene – quel vin préférez-vous?
Here’s the story – it seems the link wasn’t sober either.
Wine makes superconductors better at their jobs. And apparently, it makes some scientists better at their jobs too.
Superconductors behave like most metals; they conduct electricity. They do so, however, with a twist. All metal has some resistance to the flow of electricity. But when the temperature drops, superconductors get less and less resistant (and therefore more conductive). When they reach very low temperatures, their resistance drops to zero.
Yoshihiko Takano and other researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan were in the process of creating a certain kind of superconductor by putting a compound in hot water and soaking it for hours. They also soaked the compound in a mixture of water and ethanol. It appears the process was going well, because the scientists decided to have a little party. The party included sake, whisky, various wines, shochu, and beer. At a certain point, the researchers decided to try soaking the compound in the many, many liquors they had on hand and seeing how they compared to the more conventional soaking liquids.
When they tested the resulting materials for superconductivity, they found that the ones soaked in commercial booze came out ahead. About 15 percent of the material became a superconductor for the water mixed with ethanol, and less for the pure water. By comparison, Shochu jacked up conductivity by 23 percent and red wine managed to supercharge over 62 percent of the material. The scientists were pleased, if bemused with their results.
So, a little sip of something turns out to make potential superconductors much better at their jobs. And, perhaps, scientists better at their jobs as well
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
Slow food? Please tell me more!
T.A. Balasubramanian • Indian traditional cooking is all ’slow’ – something that the elderly 40-plus generation of parents keep reminding their Gen-X children about as these live-for-the-moment toddlers order home-delivered spicy pizzas from Dominos – to be eaten in a rush without ever being fully masticated.
I remember that my mother would take about two hours over the preparation of a meal – this was in the 1960s and 70s. These days, the cooking is all done in under 50 minutes – with pressure cookers, microwaves and blenders adding to the ‘industrial’ productivity of food – but the resulting loss of sensual flavour and taste is something I have still to get over. Maybe I never will!
“Rasoi” is rooted in the Hindi word “Rasa” – which is in its essence almost untranslatable into any language – as are most of the core words referring to the sacred and the divine.
One of the many meanings of “rasa” is “juice” – that quintessential flow of flavors that comes only from slow, deliberate ripening from the organic rhythm of nature’s cycles – whether of fruits and vegetables or of peoples learning to live the good life.
Rasoi (our Hindi word for “kitchen”) then literally means that special sacred place in the home where the juices flow naturally and organically, and therefore produce profound pleasure – sacred, physiological, aesthetic, religious – even erotic.
Indians recognize that great cooks – like all true artists in every field of creativity – create diverse and unique kinds of rasa using spices like a conductor uses the many musical talents in an orchestra.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
So you like your ‘instant’ foods. I live with it Vlad. Truce!
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
Wonderful tribute to Rodney. An anti-guru a la Jiddu Krishnamurthi?
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
… where controlling and capping carbon emissions now fits in.
This systemic view of earth’s exergy resources here might help:
http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/DyUMPHW1jsSmjoZfm2XEqg/1.3-Hermann.pdf
Carbon emissions are one aspect of the exergy basket. The analysis here gives a holistic picture and puts carbon into context.
The 2009 Workshop summary adds more insights:
http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/BiologicalCaptureandUtilizationWorkshopReport.pdf
T.A. Balasubramanian • It’s hard to tell which side is right – the CO2 demonizing school or the CO2 swindle school, since there are equally convincing – and scientifically backed – arguments for both.
However, the worst case scenario – in case the CO2-demonizers are wrong, and all the sustainable solutions for sequestering CO2 and cutting carbon exercises were really not necessary – is that we might actually clean up a lot of the mess made in the Industrial Age and thereafter – at a huge cost that might create a worldwide economic depression, at best. That’s something we can recover from.
On the other hand, if the CO2-swindle school is wrong, it’s a one-way ticket to doomsday – and there’s no conceivable way we can recover from that mistake.
So it seems that CO2-demonizing is the lesser of the two evils – any day.
T.A. Balasubramanian • I had posted this earlier, but its worth a recap – there is a serious feedback cycle of amplification associated with excess CO2 – even if the excess is quite small.
When skeptics use the argument that its not about CO2, they are trying to imply that an increase in CO2 isn’t a major problem. If CO2 isn’t as powerful as water vapor, which there’s already a lot of, adding a little more CO2 couldn’t be that bad, right?
What this argument misses is the fact that water vapor creates what scientists – and possibly systems thinkers as well – would call a ‘positive feedback loop’ in the atmosphere — making any temperature changes larger than they would be otherwise.
Increased CO2 makes more water vapor, which amplifies warming.
How does this work? The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere exists in direct relation to the temperature. If you increase the temperature, more water evaporates and becomes vapor, and vice versa. So when something else causes a temperature increase (such as extra CO2 from fossil fuels), more water evaporates. Then, since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, this additional water vapor causes the temperature to go up even further—a positive feedback.
How much does water vapor amplify CO2 warming? Studies show that water vapor feedback roughly doubles the amount of warming caused by CO2. So if there is a 1°C change caused by CO2, the water vapor will cause the temperature to go up another 1°C. When other feedback loops are included, the total warming from a potential 1°C change caused by CO2 is, in reality, as much as 3°C.
The other factor to consider is that water is evaporated from the land and sea and falls as rain or snow all the time. Thus the amount held in the atmosphere as water vapour varies greatly in just hours and days as result of the prevailing weather in any location. So even though water vapour is the greatest greenhouse gas, it is relatively short-lived.
On the other hand, CO2 is removed from the air by natural geological-scale processes and these take a long time to work. Consequently CO2 stays in our atmosphere for years and even centuries. A small additional amount has a much more long-term effect.
So skeptics are right in saying that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas. What they don’t mention is that the water vapor feedback loop actually makes temperature changes caused by CO2 even bigger.
T.A. Balasubramanian • If anyone is interested in the Great CO2 Debate, this is one of the many blogs that will keep you swinging from side to side – as one’s head might swing while watching a tennis match:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-carbon-cycle-david-archer-review.html
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene, David
Like David says, the issues are well-known, but we need to find ways of connecting the dots [or in some cases, disconnecting them] with ST modeling.
One issue that is central to any ST solution – more like giving a deep shock to the present economic mental model of capitalism – is to locate points of intervention that can de-couple ‘economic growth’ – and its environmental impact – from the idea of ‘prosperity.’
Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, has some great insights:
http://fora.tv/2010/06/09/Tim_Jackson_Prosperity_Without_Growth
How do we map these ideas – and other related ones – into an agenda for sustained intervention?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Regarding the shortcomings of ‘distributism’ – there is a better way.
It is made clearer by drilling down into the mythology of ‘growth’ and its false connection with ‘prosperity’.
For example, Tim Jackson goes back to making a distinction between income and well-being. He draws on a very long philosophical literature that separates out material wealth from happiness, material wealth from flourishing, from doing well.
> Growth irrationality
>> In economics, “growth”, or the lack of it, describes the trajectory of Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Product, two slightly different measures of national income (they differ, basically, only in that one includes earnings from overseas assets). An economy is said to be growing if the financial value of all the exchanges of goods and services within it goes up. The absence of growth gets described, pejoratively, as recession. Prolonged recessions are called depressions.
>> An economy may grow, for example, because money is being spent on clearing up after disasters or pollution incidents, or to control rising crime or widespread disease. You may also have “jobless growth”, in which the headline figure for GDP rises but new employment is not generated, or environmentally destructive growth, in which a kind of false monetary value is created by liquidating irreplaceable natural assets on which livelihoods depend.
>> Research highlights a flaw at the heart of the general economic strategy that relies upon global economic growth to reduce poverty. The distribution of costs and benefits from economic growth is highly unbalanced. The share of benefits reaching those on the lowest incomes is shrinking. In this system, paradoxically, in order to generate ever smaller benefits for the poorest, those who are already rich and “over-consuming” are required to consume ever more.
Jackson also points out to the extent of ‘ecological illiteracy’ that pervades current economics and political thinking:
> Economics – and macro-economics in particular – remains ecologically illiterate.
> “We have no model for how common macro-economic ‘aggregates’ (production, consumption, investment, trade, capital stocks, public spending, labour, money supply and so on) behave when capital doesn’t accumulate. We have no models to account systematically for our economic dependency on ecological variables such as resource use and ecological services.
So we need to look for a model of ‘prosperity’ that is
[a] de-coupled from growth in the standard economic sense that makes no ’sense’.
[b] capable of reflecting economic dependency on ‘ecological variables’ and ‘psychological prosperity variables’
T.A. Balasubramanian • Some of the mad paradoxes on which current mental models of economics are based.
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http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4120–Growth-can-t-go-on-
“Growth can’t go on”
Viki Johnson
From birth to puberty a hamster doubles its weight each week. If, then, instead of levelling-off in maturity as animals do, the hamster continued to grow at the same rate, on its first birthday we would be facing a nine-billion tonne hamster. If it kept eating at the same ratio of food to body weight, by then its daily intake would be greater than the total, annual amount of maize produced worldwide.
There is a reason that in nature things do not grow indefinitely.
Yet the entire canon of mainstream contemporary economics seems to believe that economics exists independently of the laws of biology, chemistry and physics. It assumes, without exception, that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is both desirable and possible.
::::::::::::::
Well-being economics – or ‘true prosperity economics’ offers an alternative to the problems associated with unsustainable economic growth. Underpinning it is the recognition that economic growth was only ever intended as a means to an end, and that by prioritising the “means” – in other words focusing so heavily on economic growth – we have lost track of the “end”, of what really matters.
At the heart of well-being economics is the understanding that the “end” in question is a high level of well-being for all, achieved through economic activity that uses environmental resources in a sustainable way. If society’s goal is understood to be high well-being, and the means of achieving it is recognised as sustainable economic activity, we will be better equipped to deal with the biggest challenge that we face in the twenty-first century.
Unending global economic growth is not only impossible, it is also neither desirable nor necessary. If you have any doubts, ask a hamster.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • How does one model ecological costs? One of the ways is to do an ‘emergy analysis’ based on Odum’s concept of emergy [that I had mentioned earlier]
Here’s an example: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Ecost
The systems model of ecost for North Carolina illustrates how it might work at a macro level – assuming a geographical boundary condition such as a ’state’ for defining a system. This also makes sense because environmental laws can be enacted only inside well-defined political or national boundaries.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Michael
“A value system is based on action directed to restoration and protection of life support systems, then ‘restorative growth’ has a different meaning from ‘destructive growth’ …”
Exactly – that’s the crux of the issue. At the same time, we need to drill down into ‘destructive growth’ by identifying the specific elements that make it destructive of ecological sense.
First, we need to recognize how our economic and accounting systems are flawed because they fail to take into account the resources and services we get “free” from nature.
In ‘Natural Capitalism’, there are four principles that can be used as points of intervention to graduate from destructive to restorative growth
[ 1 ] Radically increased resource productivity
[ 2 ] Redesign industry on biological lines, with no waste and no toxicity
There is colossal industrial and social waste and unaddressed inefficiency that goes into the finite planet’s systems. It is extremely profitable to wring out waste, even today when nature is valued at approximately zero, because there is so much waste – quite an astonishing amount after several centuries of market capitalism.
We need to clean up our industrial age processes from inside out by putting ecological factors first. For example, an estimated average of 706 million gallons of oil pollution entering our oceans each year. Of this, less than 10% is from natural seepage of oil from the ocean floor and eroding of sedimentary rock. The remaining 644 million gallons comes from human activities.
[ 3 ] Shifting focus from the sale of goods (eg light bulbs) to the provision of services (illumination) or “why sell when you can lease?” – in other words, re-engineer the ‘goods’ economy into a ’service provision’ economy
We need to revisit industrial age inefficiencies in manufacturing a stream of goods for the consumer. For example, the efficiency of converting coal at the power plant into light in a home is under 3%. The efficiency with which a car uses fuel to move a driver is less than 1%.
[ 4 ] Take the profits from these kinds of improvements and reinvest them in natural capital – the basis of future prosperity. Use biomimicry – or nature’s wisdom to reinvest the savings for ‘restorative growth’
These 4 principles, taken together, offer a substitute for destructive growth by leveraging ecology as the central theme, rather than as a free dumping ground.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
“So, perhaps we could come up with a way to rate the resilience features of particular places, e.g., quality of the soil, ability of the land to retain water and to clean water appropriately before it goes to creeks and rivers.”
There is a way – it’s what is dubbed as “natural capital” by the proponents of Natural Capitalism. It’s difficult to pin down at first, like ‘goodwill’ or ‘brand value’ but I’m sure that our financial wizards will be able to do the due diligence when challenged to do so!
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http://motherjones.com/politics/1997/03/natural-capitalism?page=2
Natural Capital
Natural systems provide trillions of dollars in services that have no man-made substitutes, as Biosphere II’s failure shows.
Everyone is familiar with the traditional definition of capital as accumulated wealth in the form of investments, factories, and equipment. “Natural capital,” on the other hand, comprises the resources we use, both nonrenewable (oil, coal, metal ore) and renewable (forests, fisheries, grasslands). Although we usually think of renewable resources in terms of desired materials, such as wood, their most important value lies in the services they provide. These services are related to, but distinct from, the resources themselves. They are not pulpwood but forest cover, not food but topsoil. Living systems feed us, protect us, heal us, clean the nest, let us breathe. They are the “income” derived from a healthy environment: clean air and water, climate stabilization, rainfall, ocean productivity, fertile soil, watersheds, and the less-appreciated functions of the environment, such as processing waste — both natural and industrial. Nature’s Services, a book due out this spring edited by Stanford University biologist Gretchen C. Daily, identifies trillions of dollars of critical ecosystem services received annually by commerce.
For anyone who doubts the innate value of ecosystem services, the $200 million Biosphere II experiment stands as a reality check. In 1991, eight people entered a sealed, glass-enclosed, 3-acre living system, where they expected to remain alive and healthy for two years. Instead, air quality plummeted, carbon dioxide levels rose, and oxygen had to be pumped in from the outside to keep the inhabitants healthy. Nitrous oxide levels inhibited brain function. Cockroaches flourished while insect pollinators died, vines choked out crops and trees, and nutrients polluted the water so much that the residents had to filter it by hand before they could drink it. Of the original 25 small animal species in Biosphere II, 19 became extinct.
At the end of 17 s, the humans showed signs of oxygen starvation from living at the equivalent of an altitude of 17,500 feet. Of course, design flaws are inherent in any prototype, but the fact remains that $200 million could not maintain a functioning ecosystem for eight people for 17 s. We add eight people to the planet every three seconds.
The lesson of Biosphere II is that there are no man-made substitutes for essential natural services. We have not come up with an economical way to manufacture watersheds, gene pools, topsoil, wetlands, river systems, pollinators, or fisheries. Technological fixes can’t solve problems with soil fertility or guarantee clean air, biological diversity, pure water, and climatic stability; nor can they increase the capacity of the environment to absorb 25 billion tons of waste created annually in America alone.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • John
The human race has always suffered from the “Tragedy of the Commons” – in this case, on a planetary scale. Much though I dislike saying it, we’re a collectively stupid species – responding only when driven to the very edge of the precipice by personal calamities.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Patric
Fire in the belly? I hope you’re offering some antacids!
George Mobus, a professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma has a very educative blog which I enjoy reading – it’s called ‘Question Everything’ – and he does it wonderfully well, while exploring ideas with great lucidity.
Here’s a tutorial (one of many such in the blog) worth reading and reflecting over:
Work, Exergy, the Economy, Money, and Wealth
T.A. Balasubramanian • Professor Mobus offers this insight into the relationship between exergy flow and money flow and the consequent illusion of wealth that distorts economic ‘reality’
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[Figure 3 - referring to the picture above]
The economy is viewed as a set of flows of material, energy, and information. The physical resources flow from left to right. Every process requires specific exergy to perform its work. That energy is consumed and dissipates as waste heat (red curvy arrows). Eventually the consumption process produces waste materials (actually the work process and extraction processes do also, but it is not shown to keep the diagram simple). Consumption helps to produce labor energy (grey curvy arrows) which is fed back into the extraction and production processes. Money (dark, thin, curvy arrows) flows in the opposite direction of exergy and embodied energy (emergy) flows. Money is used to purchase labor energy which is how money gets recycled even while all energies flow in only one direction, out to the environment as waste heat.
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In this view of an economy each downstream process must signal the providers of materials and exergy of their needs/desires. They do this by using a very abstract message token called ‘money’. When anyone buys a product or service they are signaling the producer that there is a continuing demand for that product or service.
The producer then signals his suppliers by buying the goods and services he needs to produce his output. The flow of money, represented in the figure by thin black curvy arrows, runs exactly counter to the flow of exergy and emergy, including labor energy (which we might label lexergy). Since people provide the lexergy in the system, money then recycles through the economy.
What should we count as wealth in this picture? Currently economists count wealth as being the sum of all money transactions (purchases). As long as the monetary form being used (such as a fiat currency) actually was used as shown in Figure 3 then this would be a correct approach since all money would represent the actual work being accomplished in all forms.
Typically this will boil down to the production of goods and services that are deemed economically useful. But, unfortunately, we people have gotten into some very bad habits that cause a major distortion in this measure of wealth. And those distortions have a positive feedback effect on those bad habits.
The distortions make it look like we are producing more wealth as measured by that summation of transactions (the Gross Domestic Product, GDP) than there actually is physical wealth in the system. This leads to doing the things that caused the distortions in the first place and making us feel good about how much supposed wealth we have made.
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In this short systemic view, we have a clear idea of why money-economics produces an illusion of wealth, “with the false creation of more money that is not represented by an equivalent amount of exergy. The bad habits are actually venerated today.
They are collectively called ‘financing’!”
T.A. Balasubramanian • Sustainability has to relate to human well-being too. So how do we measure well-being? If we are to keep ecology and prosperity in the picture, we need ways to be able to tell whether the economy is contributing to human well-being.
As a chief economic indicator, GDP has numerous flaws long known to economists. GDP measures the amount of commerce in a country, but counts remedial and defensive expenditures (such as the costs of security, police, pollution clean up, etc.) as positive contributions to commerce.
A better measure of economic well-being would deduct such costs, and add in other non-market benefits (such as volunteer work, unpaid domestic work, and unpriced ecosystem services) in arriving at an indicator of well-being.
As economic development on the planet approaches or surpasses the limits of ecosystems to provide resources and absorb human effluents, calling into question the ability of the planet to continue to support civilization (per the arguments of Jared Diamond, among others), many people have called for getting “Beyond GDP” (the title of a recent EU conference) in order to measure progress not as the mere increase in commercial transactions, nor as an increase in specifically economic well-being, but as an increase in general well-being as people themselves subjectively report it.
Qualitative and quantitative indicators
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There is no exact quantitative definition of a GNH [Gross National Happiness] index but elements that contribute to GNH are subject to quantitative measurement. Low rates of infant mortality, for instance, correlate positively with subjective expressions of well-being or happiness within a country.
GNH, like the Genuine Progress Indicator, refers to the concept of a quantitative measurement of well-being and happiness. The two measures are both motivated by the notion that subjective measures like well-being are more relevant and important than more objective measures like consumption. It is not measured directly, but only the factors which are believed to lead to it.
According to Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton University psychologist, happiness can be measured using the day reconstruction method, which consists in recollecting memories of the previous working day by writing a short diary.
A second-generation GNH concept, treating happiness as a socioeconomic development metric, was proposed in 2006 by Med Jones, the President of International Institute of Management. The metric measures socioeconomic development by tracking 7 development area including the nation’s mental and emotional health. GNH value is proposed to be an index function of the total average per capita of the measures:
1. Economic Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of economic metrics such as consumer debt, average income to consumer price index ratio and income distribution
2. Environmental Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of environmental metrics such as pollution, noise and traffic
3. Physical Wellness: Indicated via statistical measurement of physical health metrics such as severe illnesses
4. Mental Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of mental health metrics such as usage of antidepressants and rise or decline of psychotherapy patients
5. Workplace Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of labor metrics such as jobless claims, job change, workplace complaints and lawsuits
6. Social Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of social metrics such as discrimination, safety, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflicts and family lawsuits, public lawsuits, crime rates
7. Political Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of political metrics such as the quality of local democracy, individual freedom, and foreign conflicts.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
American’s notion of sustainability hardly goes beyond 1) a sustainable paycheck, 2) full gas-tank, 3) something to wear tomorrow, 4) toothpaste, and 5) ketchup and/or salsa in the fridge.
Doctors provide nurses with checklists of items to be included in intravenous drips for coma patients. Presumably for ’sustaining’ them indefinitely. One could stretch this to mean ‘well-being’ … but I wonder if that’s a world worth wishing for.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
Consumption is a portmanteau word, so I’m going to drill down a little here.
> Today’s dominant economic Malthusianism takes advantage of the semantic confusion generated by two different definitions of consumption. In environmental terms, consumption means the using up of natural and physical resources. It is sometimes referred to in terms of the throughput of energy and materials from natural resource tap to environmental sink (the eventual depositing of the waste in air, land, and sea). It thus stands for all economic activity.
> In traditional economics, in contrast, consumption is only one part of aggregate economic demand — that part accounted for by the purchases of consumers. In a given national economy (abstracting from exports/imports) total demand consists of consumption plus investment plus government spending. Government spending can be seen as consisting of public consumption and public investment. In its simplest terms, then, income equals consumption plus investment. From an economic standpoint, therefore, consumption is merely consumer demand, in contradistinction to investor demand.
Looked at from the other side of the table, that is, output or production, consumption equals the output of the consumer goods sector as opposed to the output of the investment goods sector. Consumer goods thus represent only one part of total output or production.
By ignoring the difference between these two very different notions of consumption, it is easy to insinuate that the problem of the consumption of environmental resources is to be pinned on consumers alone.
To neglect in this way the impact of investors on the environment is to exclude the motor force of the capitalist economy. Spending by investors is logically just as much a part of overall environmental throughput as is the spending of consumers. To lose sight of investment in the environmental equation is to deemphasize the role of production, profits, and capital accumulation.
The confusion that the misuse of these two different definitions of consumption generates in the environmental discourse is evident in the common fallacy that by not consuming but rather saving income one can somehow protect the environment.
In a properly functioning capitalist economy savings are redirected into investment or new capital formation designed to expand the scale of the entire economy. And it is such expansion that is the chief enemy of the environment.
Another error arising from the blending of these two different concepts of consumption is to be seen in the frequent conflation of total environmental waste in society with waste related to direct household consumption, that is, taking the form of municipal solid waste (garbage).
All too often garbage is treated as a problem mainly associated with the direct consumption of consumers. But municipal solid waste in society is estimated to be only some 2.5 percent of the total waste generated by the society, which also includes: (1) industrial waste, (2) construction and demolition waste, and (3) special waste (waste from mining, fuel production, and metals processing). This other 97.5 percent of solid waste disposal, outside of households, is invisible to most individuals who, in their role as consumers, have no direct part in either its generation or disposal.
So consumption in a sustainability dialogue – is far more complex than a term directed at consumers in a mall on a spending spree – or good old consumerism.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
Thanks for the ‘Repower America’ link. It has a lot of ideas on energy efficiency – an area I have been exploring recently in the context of datacenter (DC) management.
One of the companies I work with has recently been taken over by Schneider Electric, the French energy management multinational. They focus on datacenters as well as the broader area of Building Management Systems with a slew of solutions:
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
The 2010 WEF documents are excellent references for developing ST models.
The ideas explored in ‘Redesigning Business Value: A Roadmap for Sustainable Consumption’ are close to what the proponents of Natural Capitalism are proposing:
> Shift to cycles: Especially Fig 4 which outlines the distinction between Linear and Closed Loop Value Chains, which urges a shift from partial to total recycling. This is diabolically hard to get to, and its going to be even harder to convince businesses to do it – perhaps we need heavy sticks here and giant carrots that would produce the necessary shift in mental models.
> Cases: The Roadmap examples – Walmart, Shaklee, Better Place, Dongtan (and maybe Bhutan can be added) are great role models that make it easier to derive indicative ST models.
> Alternatives: Fig 5 – the Framework for BM Suatainability reflects Natural Capitalism principles – but we can well explore alternate organization, performance management and process designs.
I haven’t gone through the second – Global Redesign Initiative – that’s homework for the weekend!
T.A. Balasubramanian • Stephen
Are you referring to Transphorm?
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/02/24/transphorm-targets-data-center-power-losses/
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
Benyus and ‘Dirt’ are after my own heart! Synthesis – what a great idea. I’d like to know more about projects that find ways to use – or bury – all the piles of plastic waste we churn out without leaving eternal toxic footprints on the sands of time!
Cleaning – or deeply burying – plastic wastelands is one part of the challenge.
How do we end the plastic manufacturing era peacefully? Are we producing more plastic these days or less than we did a decade ? Any ideas?
T.A. Balasubramanian • David, Stephen, Mary
So there is hope for getting the plastic invasion of the planet under control! Thanks for your various insights and connective ideas.
Helene – maybe we should start a Glossary and Resources wiki page for this thread?
I did some snooping for resources on Biomimicry and related projects:
Biomimicry
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Here is an inspiring talk by Micahel Pawlyn on how Biomimicry can help sustainability initiatives:
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pawlyn_using_nature_s_genius_in_architecture.html
To quote Pawlyn: “If you want to build a flotilla of ships you do not sit around talking about carpentry. You set souls ablaze with visions of distant and exciting shores.”
In this talk Michael Pawlyn seeks to set our souls ablaze with a vision of turning our problems relating to sustainability to opportunities using biomimicry.
He talks about:
> 1. Radical increase in efficiency
> 2. Close loop systems and
> 3. Leveraging solar energy
He is not talking in the abstract. Here are some concrete examples of what he has done:
Plans for a huge vertical axis wind-turbine inspired by the sycamore seeds:
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/jul/18/architecture.energy
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In addition he brings up the concept of a “Sea Water Green House” that is inspired by the Namibian Fog basking beetle. This could have immediate implications for use in coastal regions where it could potentially be transformative.
The Eden Project
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The Eden Project has turned an abandoned quarry into a tourist attraction. The project is inspired by the use of membranes in biology and led to the construction of the world’s largest biomes.
Here is the story on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO44zejAXcI&feature=fvwrel
Here is the official web site:
http://www.edenproject.com/index.php
And a few article resources related to bio-mimicry:
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http://www.economist.com/node/9719013
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T.A. Balasubramanian • The French say, ‘Les yeux sont le miroir de l’dme’ – ‘The eyes are the mirror of the soul.’
We need more JRs to turn the world ‘inside out’ – and some of the ideas that come from artists on fire do exactly that.
I thought these tales of turning junk into art were awe-inspiring:
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When Art Rolls In From The Sea
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/when_art_rolls.php
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Nevada Shoe Tree
http://ritemail-amazing.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html
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But a wily scientist can do even better than an artist with lowly e-coli
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Bacteria Transformed into Biofuel Refineries
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bacteria-transformed-into-biofuel-refineries
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Which only goes to prove that everything that one considers as garbage or as a health hazard turns out to be valuable for a sustainable planet. You just need to look at it with different eyes.
T.A. Balasubramanian • There seem to be any number of new ideas on sustainability strategies that seek alternatives to the ‘growth at any cost’ mental model of capitalism.
Sustainable de-growth – one such idea – is defined as a conscious transition to a smaller economy with less production and consumption.
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Science for Environment Policy, DG ENV News Alert, 16 September 2010, Issue 209.
“Sustainable de-growth: Mapping the context, criticisms and future prospects of
an emergent paradigm”
The concept of sustainable de-growth has been attracting interest. There is little agreement on international targets on greenhouse gas emissions and other targets, such as UN Millennium Development goals, look increasingly unachievable. Alternative policy approaches are therefore being considered. Currently sustainable development is the favoured approach, which aims to address environmental concerns whilst promoting economic growth.
Sustainable de-growth has at its core a downscaling of economy and believes that economic growth, even if disguised as sustainable development, will lead to social and ecological collapse. It proposes that decreasing the size of resource flows is the only way to ensure resources are not depleted and this must be coupled with strengthened social and ecological values.
The origins of sustainable de-growth are complex because it is both a Marxist-influenced intellectual concept developed in France and a grass-roots movement developed in Northern countries. The latter is based in ecological economics and proposes a decrease in consumption in countries that exceed their allowable ecological footprint.
Although the concept of sustainable de-growth appears to be a theoretical alternative to sustainable development and one that might bring faster and more impressive results, its practical application needs careful consideration. De-growth cannot be simply ‘switched on’ and societies will find it very difficult to undergo the change. Adequate preparation and conditions are needed if it is to successfully lead to the changes it proposes.
Firstly, alongside the EU’s agreement to decrease CO2 levels, there should be targets for reducing environmental impact indicators, such as energy consumption, natural resources and land use. Accompanying this there should be research and analysis to understand the required conditions for reaching these objectives. For example, research into the profiles of societies, in terms of their levels of consumption and industrialisation. Secondly, inherent to sustainable de-growth is a reduction in GDP. This is likely to cause an increase in unemployment unless initiatives are in place to reduce the amount of working time by individuals, delink income from employment or develop formulas for a basic income.
One example – European agri-environment measures which provide farmers with incentives linked to sustainable use of land instead of production.
In general, the relations between de-growth, income, and employment need careful discussion.
However, GDP is not the only economic indicator and the concept of growth itself must be further defined and developed so that the meaning of ‘de-growth’ is clearer and more consistently understood. Currently it has different definitions depending on whether it is used by academics or grass roots organisations. There may also need to be more coherence in general between its proponents, for example, between conservationists, trade unions, agro-ecologists and peasant movements.
Sustainable de-growth has an obvious disadvantage in that it confronts current powers in society. No important economic players, such as government leaders or private sector executives, would have an interest in considering a no-growth policy. Advantages of downsizing and improving the ethical aims of society need to be promoted in this respect.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Yes, Marco, we know about the millions of poor as well as you do. The ‘obvious’ Maslow priorities that you mention are perhaps, part of the problem – the baggage from standard economic development models inherited from the past. Maslow only talked of individuals and their hierarchy of needs – but today’s societies are driven by vastly different forces.
The pro-capitalist development model pursued in most countries is a highly unequal one, favouring wealthy groups and the aspirant middle class by promoting capital- and knowledge-intensive growth. It also creates deeper divides in society by making the rich richer, and the poor, poorer.
There are other growth models – as we have in India – that favour the poorest more – to combat inequality, economic policy needs to encourage job creation and opportunities for the poorest, including largescale investments in free or affordable basic services.
But such policies are unlikely to be chosen if they prejudice the opportunities of the middle class – the Facebook generation – to live like their “peers” in richer countries (which they would do if they led to slower growth in wealth and wages for the already affluent).
You can read as many reports about inequality as you want (and there are lots) but the most important barrier to the introduction of pro-poor economic strategies is quite simple: lack of political will. What are the chances of the vast numbers among the educated classes deciding to forgo the luxuries that their Facebook peers in the west (even the not very educated ones) discuss online? A car. Frequent trips abroad. The latest gadgets. Answer: about as much chance as those of us who already take all these things for granted deciding to give them up. Consumerism is a powerful force.
In the better off “middle income” countries, home to two-thirds of the world’s poorest people, the Facebook generation has done well out of the last 20 years. But their fortunes contrast with the huge numbers of people still living in abject poverty in city slums or further out in the countryside. In 55% of middle-income countries inequality has increased since the 1990s, and in a further 20% it has remained high, decreasing in only a quarter of middle-income countries – according to the World Bank.
Perhaps we witnessing the emergence of a new type of polarisation, not between countries as before, but between international income brackets? It seems that the goal of reducing inequality (and with it poverty itself) is set back when the middle-classes in poor countries set their sights on overseas living standards – and their governments are more than willing to oblige by encouraging lavish consumerism. But doing so is only natural – all most of them want is a better life and more opportunities for their kids.
That’s why we need to understand why these accepted economic theories of the past have not worked in eliminating inequality – and look for different mental models for building sustainable futures for societies in different stages of development.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
It is not surprising that artists are almost always the first to break through the barriers of cultural monotony – perhaps because society gives artists permission to be outrageous.
We need more artists – or at least outrageous thinkers – to break through the mental models of development. Not leading to Ponzi schemes, though!
Bucky Fuller was ahead of his time. His ‘Spaceship Earth’ imagination is just what we are beginning to see as the seed necessary to bring planetary awareness into fossil economics.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Well, Columbus or no Columbus, we need to get a fix on what the hell needs to be done right now to clean up the unholy mess we have created in the air.
Here are three critical numbers to watch:
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http://www.350.org/about/science/
There are three numbers you need to really understand global warming, 275, 388, and 350.
For all of human history until about 200 years , our atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide.
By now — and this is the second number — the planet has about 388 parts per million CO2 – and this number is rising by about 2 parts per million every year.
The world’s leading climate scientists have now revised the highest safe level of CO2 to 350 parts per million
That’s the last number you need to know, and the most important. It’s the safety zone for planet earth.
As James Hansen of America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the first scientist to warn about global warming more than two decades , wrote recently:
“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”
That will be a hard task, but not impossible.
We need to taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air. Above all, that means we need to burning so much coal — and start using solar and wind energy and other such sources of renewable energy – while ensuring the Global South a fair chance to develop.
If we do, then the earth’s soils and forests will slowly cycle some of that extra carbon out of the atmosphere, and eventually CO2 concentrations will return to a safe level. By decreasing use of other fossil fuels, and improving agricultural and forestry practices around the world, scientists believe we could get back below 350 by mid-century.
But the longer we remain in the danger zone — above 350 — the more likely that we will see disastrous and irreversible climate impacts.
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That’s one ship – The Mayflower. What are the other numbers we have to watch out for?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
We need these two amazing girls here in India to demonstrate how they do it.
The pioneer in this ‘loo-profile’ technology is Dr. Pathak, a man of rare vision and sense, who has created a whole system of low-cost loos that are now being introduced in many underdeveloped countries.
http://www.sulabhinternational.org/st/sulabh_public_toilet_complexes.php
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http://www.sulabhinternational.org/st/advantages_sulabh_toilets.php
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T.A. Balasubramanian • The complex relationship between food, biofuels, oil and riots. How do these dots connect?
Mary, you had mentioned ethanol and energy farming before.
I came across this analysis while looking around for ways to connect the dots, which includes the visual of the cyclical relationships on a ear of corn – symbolic of the systemic complexity of the issues involved.
I like the visual here – it brings out the power of using visual ST tools very well. This is a useful template to guide one in mapping complex issues.
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http://www.aboutmyplanet.com/science-technology/sides-ethanol-crisis-2/
It seems as if every time we take an eco-step forward we discover an error and end up two-step backs. Take Ethanol for example, is Ethanol really fueling the Food Crisis?
The answer…there are two sides to this story.
Experts like, Lester Brown (founder and President of Earth Policy Institute) claim that, “ten to 30 percent of the recent rise in global food prices is due to demand for biofuels.” He states that the corn crop is going to fuel not food. RFA (Renewable Fuel Association) argues differently. RFA it is the price of oil that is causing the crisis.
Corn is a huge food staple for the US as well as other countries around the world. If it is in fact true that corn crop is going to fuel and not food what will that do to a nation who is already paying high prices for food? What is the impact of it on poor countries that can now barely pay the prices for their basic foods?
As a consumer whom do we believe? Let’s look at the facts. Food prices are high. The poor in developing countries and in developed countries will suffer the consequences of higher food prices and there is a food crisis, but “what” is to blame?
C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer believe wheat and rice prices have surged to decade highs, “because even as those grains are increasingly being used as substitutes for corn, farmers are planting more acres with corn and fewer acres with other crops.”
They argue that by placing “pressure on global supplies of edible crops, the surge in ethanol production will translate into higher prices for both processed and staple foods around the world.
They believe, “Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers, and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for both global poverty and food security.” (Yale Global)
However RFA argues that the food crisis is due to the increase in high oil prices. They mention, “numerous statistical analyses have demonstrated that the price of oil – not corn prices or ethanol production – has the greatest impact on consumer food prices because is integral to virtually every phase of food production, from processing to packaging to transportation.”
The Food/Food Crisis debate is endless and expert after expert proves or disproves the value of Ethanol. What is Washington involvment in all of this? Many Politicians advocate Ethanol derived from corn. They “subsidize and protect” it. Is this a bad thing? Depends on why they’re doing it. Less dependency of foreign oil? To help American farmers prosper? For the sake of the health of the people and the environment? For votes?
“As the conservative critic James Bovard noted over a decade , nearly half of ADM’s [Archer, Daniels, Midlands] profits have come from products that the U.S. government has either subsidized or protected” (Yale Global). Lester Brown believes that unless the governments do something soon to take care of the food crisis people are going to take to the streets and riot.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Lorraine
You mention the example of ‘The Only’ in your profile and link page:
>> The Only used to be a very tiny little restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada which was known far and wide. Why? It’s a lesson in success: Provide a good product at a good price with energy, enthusiasm and a smile! Create “an experience” every single time. They’ll pack in! <<
That’s the model we need to replicate for “doing the best for the earth and its people” – “Provide a good ‘product’ at a good price with energy, enthusiasm and a smile! Create an experience …”
The planet’s ecosystem is a ‘product’ that we offer to future generations – the problem is that there has been no ‘business’ representative for promoting Nature – The Only.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Lorraine’s post got me thinking – what are the business opportunities that are opening up when we put Nature into the equation?
One ‘industry’ that seems promising is eco-tourism. It’s a huge opportunity that conservationists and governments strapped for revenue are taking to – in Africa, India, Australia, Singapore, Canada and many more countries. But there are also problems of displacement of populations in the ‘nature zones’.
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http://www.celsias.com/article/ecotourism-and-sustainable-development-who-owns-pa/
In the early 1960s, on the cusp of the end of colonialism, there were about 1,000 protected areas in the world. Today there are 108,000, a hundredfold increase in the last four decades. This equals more than 12 percent of all land, and exceeds the IUCN’s target of protecting 10 percent of the earth, as was proudly announced at the 2003 World Parks Congress.
“At first glance, so much protected land seems undeniably positive, an enormous achievement by good people doing the right thing for our suffering planet,” writes investigative journalist and Berkeley professor Mark Dowie. “But,” he cautions, “the record is less impressive when we consider the impact of setting aside large tracts of land upon millions of displaced indigenous people.”
These displaced people have created a new class of “conservation refugees” found on every continent but Antarctica. They are largely invisible, often live in squalid conditions around protected areas, and are roughly estimated to number between 5 million and tens of millions of human beings. One of the largest forced removals, which attracted international attention, occurred in the central African country of Chad. While the total protected area was increased from 1 percent to 9.1 percent in the 1990s, an estimated six hundred thousand people were evicted from their lands.
Many of the world’s approximately 350 million indigenous people live in spectacularly beautiful parts of the globe, areas increasingly penetrated by tourism, frequently in the name of ecotourism. Indeed, often the most vibrant and militant rural social movements in developing countries center on national parks, local people, and tourism. As one study of ecotourism and economic liberalization puts it, “a new grassroot environmentalism gained strength worldwide in the 1990s [and] became connected to issues of social justice and the concept of environmental justice.”
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In recent years there were instances in Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Rwanda, and Uganda of rural people being expelled from their land to create new parks and ecotourism projects. Many people resisted moving from their traditional lands, even when they were offered compensation.
As one elderly South African in the Kosi Bay area put it, “Where do these people take the right to make money out of our land? We don’t want compensation, we want our land. . . . They say they want to protect nature. But aren’t people also part of God’s nature?” Although the ultimate outcome of many of these disputes remains unclear, the terms of discourse and forms of organizing have changed: environmental protection and the land and economic rights of rural people are now part of the debate.
In these struggles, rural communities and indigenous people are building national and sometimes international alliances to demand an equitable slice of the economic pie, which now frequently includes ecotourism.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Green Business and Sustainability Status 2011
Three recent reports provide positive reinforcement that traction on sustainability is building in the private and public sector.
As Bob Willard, the sustainability speaker and champion says, “This news reenergizes our efforts. We live on hope that our combined efforts as sustainability champions will accelerate the take-up of environmentally, socially, and economically responsible strategies. Usually, during economic recessions, we lose ground. Strangely, in the current recession, the opposite has happened: sustainability-related strategies have been embraced more strongly.”
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GreenBiz’s fourth annual State of Green Business 2011 report
From the GreenBiz State of Green Business Forum 2011 in San Francisco, February 2-3. GreenBiz Group’s Chairman and Executive Director, Joel Makower, reviewed the highlights of GreenBiz’s fourth annual State of Green Business 2011 report, released that same week. Its findings reveal a “sea change in corporate sustainability efforts:” 89% of companies expect their investments in environmental affairs to be the same or larger in 2011 than in 2010; 56% of companies expect their investments in green product development will be greater in 2011, compared to 28% who expected it to be the same as in 2010. That’s encouraging news.
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Sustainability: The ‘Embracers’ Seize Advantage
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/special-report/sustainability-advantage/
Then on February 10, the MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group (BSG) released their winter 2011 research report: “Sustainability: The ‘Embracers’ Seize Advantage.” Based on a survey of 3,000 corporate leaders, the report describes two kinds of companies: “embracers”— those who place sustainability high on their agenda — and “cautious adopters,” who have yet to focus on more than energy cost savings, material efficiency, and risk mitigation.
“Many of us wondered whether the economic downturn and lack of progress toward international agreement on how to combat climate change would push sustainability off the corporate agenda. The MIT-BSG survey results indicate that the opposite is true: 59% of companies in all industry sectors increased their investments in sustainability in 2010, versus 25% in 2009. Even more striking, almost 70% expect their organization to step up its investment in and management of sustainability in 2011. Impressive.”
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Community Sustainability Snapshot: 2010 Survey Results from Local Governments
Similar momentum is happening in municipalities in Canada. On February 16, Joanne DeVries released her Fresh Outlook Foundation’s “Community Sustainability Snapshot: 2010 Survey Results from Local Governments.”
It found that:
> 44% of respondents have sustainability plans, compared with 23% in 2007
> 59% have sustainability programs and projects, compared with 42% in 2007
> 52% have sustainability policies and/or regulations, compared with 34% in 2007
> 51% have staff devoted to sustainability, compared with 37% in 2007
“If Canadian municipalities are upping their focus on environmental, social, and economic issues, it’s very likely that a similar dynamic is happening in other countries. Nice.”
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“We are going in the right direction. Let’s take a minute to bask in the glow of these positive reports about how momentum is building around sustainability strategies in the private and public sectors. Then let’s redouble our efforts to contribute to it.”
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Natural Capitalism
To offset all the generalized demonizing that we’ve seen so far about evil corporations – here’s an example of a global corporation that believes in Natural Capitalism – and goes the extra mile to prove it.
Their products are part of our daily food basket – the current favorite is a low-fat yogurt.
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Creating Shared Value at Nestlé
Creating Shared Value is the basic way we do business, which states that in order to create long-term value for shareholders, we have to create value for society. But we cannot be either environmentally sustainable or create shared value for shareholders and society if we fail to comply with our Business Principles.
This involves compliance with national laws and relevant conventions, as well as our own regulations, which often go beyond our legal obligations. For example, we support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which stands at the basis of the UN Global Compact’s Human Rights Principles, and our CEO Paul Bulcke signed the UN Global Compact CEO Statement for the 60th anniversary of the UDHR.
Our strong support for the UN Global Compact, and our detailed commitments to the Fundamental Conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO) or other relevant instruments, are laid out in our Nestlé Corporate Business Principles and related policy documents, and their application is verified through our CARE programme and our internal Corporate Group Auditors.
Beyond that, how we do business is based on sustainability – ensuring that our activities preserve the environment for future generations. In line with the Brundtland Commission’s definition, sustainable development to Nestlé means “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”
At the same time, Creating Shared Value goes beyond compliance and sustainability. Any business that thinks long term and s sound business principles creates value for shareholders and for society through its activities eg. in terms of jobs for workers, taxes to support public services and economic activity in general.
But Creating Shared Value goes one step further. A company consciously identifies areas of focus, where: a) shareholders’ and society’s interests strongly intersect, and b) where value creation can be optimised for both. As a result, the company invests resources, both in terms of talent and capital, in those areas where the potential for joint value creation is the greatest, and seeks collaborative action with relevant stakeholders in society.
At Nestlé, we have analysed our value chain and determined that the areas of greatest potential for joint value optimisation with society are Nutrition, Water and Rural Development. These activities are core to our business strategy and vital to the welfare of the people in the countries where we operate.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • What do the young feel about the future?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4abiHdQpc&feature=player_embedded
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary,
My pet bias – ‘demonizing’ – and yes, it’s not necessary.
Let’s put on our systems thinking caps and look for ways to bring the warring parties into a ‘green dialogue’ – Vandana Shiva and Bill Gates stand to gain more by smoking the peace pipe together – or should I say ’sharing the spaceship’ – than by going at each other and creating a polarized planet when there is no need for it.
In the meantime, here’s a ‘little’ feisty not-corporation that’s doing its bit for the planet. I was posting it on one of my innovation workgroups and realized that there are thousands of little organizations who have got the message about ‘corporate environmental responsibility’ and are just finding more creative ways to express it.
The bigger boys may take a little longer to get it right.
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Axion Polymers’ recycled fridge plastic makes ‘cool’ pencils
Up to 640 pencils can be made from one typical UK recycled fridge
Axion Polymers’ high-grade recycled polystyrene made from waste fridge plastic is being turned into millions of new sustainable pencils in the plastic recycler’s latest ‘cool’ product application.
Global stationery product manufacturer BIC is using Axpoly PS01, sourced from post-consumer fridge plastic, in its new Ecolutions range of sustainable wood-free pencils sold throughout the world.
Made entirely from recycled polystyrene, the pencil’s casing looks and behaves like conventional cedar wood. Crucially, this means the pencil can be sharpened in a conventional pencil sharpener and does not splinter.
Although a wooden pencil is essentially ‘renewable’, using slow-growing trees to make a short-life, consumable product is not a sustainable solution. Furthermore, the traditional manufacturing process to produce a graphite-leaded, wooden pencil is slow and involves high levels of wood waste.
BIC introduced the all-plastic pencil ten years . More recently, with increased market pressures to further improve the sustainability of the pencil, they replaced the virgin polymers with recycled plastics.
Axion worked closely with Ineos Styrenics, a leading global manufacturer of polystyrene resins, to develop an approved specification for BIC that not only met various environmental and regulatory standards, but fulfilled the manufacturer’s requirement for a cost-effective ‘green’ product that would appeal to environmentally-conscious consumers.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Nicolas
Yes. I agree. And maybe we should have a few young people answering in this forum?
PS: I’m chronologically 58, but I think I’m psychologically just a kid – or at least my family thinks so! In any case, would be nice to hear from the very ‘young’ … say 18 to 28?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Bryan
In “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey shows us the value of making a plan for our personal and professional life. He says that everything is created twice. First it’s created in our mind when we visualize it. Then it happens in the physical world when we execute it.
When chasing our goals we must be careful to make sure that all arrangements are symbiotic and mutually rewarding. Covey’s positivism is the key – he tells us how to have an “abundance mentality” so that every joy, pleasure and achievement is turned outward so that it encourages us to appreciate the enthusiastic spirit of other individuals.
Imagination has little to do with age, if you think about it.
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
I agree. Interactive seems to come naturally anyway to the young – and the young at heart – in the era of Facebook ubiquity.
The uphill task is to encourage the young to have the courage to get off the screen and spend more ‘face’ time with people – especially people from the pre-Facebook generation, who actually enjoy reading real faces.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
Change causes persistence. What we need to live inside is the possibility of win-win transformation – getting above the either-or polarity.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad/ Mary
Thinking win-win is hugely transformative. There are gated communities in Mumbai, but they do not exclude the ebb and flow of people across different stratas, like Mary says.
Mary, for millions of poor people in India and the Asian countries, that ’safety of belonging’ would only come from financial inclusion. And what makes financial inclusion possible in the developing economies is technology.
The statistics on financial ‘exclusion’ in India are dismal. Out of the 600,000 habitations in the country, only about 30,000, or just 5 per cent, have a commercial bank branch. Just about 40 per cent of the population across the country have bank accounts, and this ratio is much lower in the north-east of the country.
In his recent book ‘Building Social Business,’ Muhammad Yunus notes that, in the 1960s, no one predicted that the Internet would take the world by storm; that laptops, palm-tops, Blackberrys, i-pods, i-phones, tablets and Kindles would be in the hands of millions.
Similarly, in 2011, perhaps we are just as unable to look ahead to 2030. In short, how technology is going to shape our world and our world views is quite unpredictable.
What is predictable, though, is that as newer technologies are ushered in, banking services will become more affordable and accessible to all. Harnessing this power of technology for financial inclusion is going to be a big opportunity and a bigger challenge for us.
Financial inclusion is a necessary condition for generating and sustaining equitable growth. There are few, if any, instances of an economy transiting from an agrarian system to a post-industrial modern society without broad-based financial inclusion.
We all know from personal experience that economic opportunity is strongly intertwined with financial access. Such access is especially powerful for the poor as it provides them opportunities to build savings, make investments and avail credit. Importantly, access to financial services also helps the poor insure themselves against income shocks and equips them to meet emergencies such as illness, death in the family or loss of employment.
But there is a brighter win-win side to the story. Contrary to common perception, financial inclusion is a potentially viable business proposition. Take the success story of Dharavi, a bustling industrial-slum in Mumbai. Wikipedia reports that Dharavi exports goods worth $500-650 million every year.
Ironically, even though Dharavi is situated right in the heart of Mumbai, the most banked city in the country, and adjoins the Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai’s financial district, it did not have a commercial bank branch for a long time. The first commercial bank branch was opened in February 2007.
In just three years, the bank registered business in excess of Rs 44 crore. Enthused by this success, one more bank has opened a branch in Dharavi and many more are eager to do so.
There are now nine ATMs in Dharavi, all of them being actively used. The reality is that money management is a well-understood part of everyday life of the poor, and therefore a key factor in determining their coping strategies.
The Dharavi example is an illustration of how banking the unbanked can be a win-win opportunity. Win-win thinking is systems thinking amplified with the power of inclusivity.
T.A. Balasubramanian • I had forgotten a currency conversion in the last post.
Rs. 44 crores (Indian currency) would be USD 9.86 million.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Folks
Davos isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, however intensely one might project wishful non-elitist voodoo chants in the general direction of Switzerland.
The elite are what they are, and they will continue dominating the economic systems of the world because that’s the reality of politics and power.
Taking ant nistic positions against those in power makes for an interesting David versus Goliath epic story, but in reality the Davids are usually confined to soapboxes in London’s Hyde Park.
What is needed is win-win thinking. I’m with Chandra on his strategy of working the elitist system from within. That’s win-win thinking.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
Yes, absolutely. I believe in complementary relationships, even if it means having to sleep with ‘the enemy’ — metaphorically speaking, of course.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Karthi’s paper on “The evil NGO” has a comment on dialogue that I think is illuminative about the need for non-confrontational strategies in general, and as a professional communication practitioner, it speaks to me of the values I should be mindful about.
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The ends – or the good intentions – of BMA and INFACT are fighting infant mortality
and promoting infant health by breastfeeding. For this, the groups were awarded with
the Right Livelihood Award in 1998, which is considered the alternative Nobel Prize.
However, the groups do not hold themselves accountable in how far they reach these
goals as no measures on child mortality, breastfeeding rates etc. are reported upon.
Therefore, their aims stay at the level of good intentions.
These intentions have clearly gone wrong, as the relational means do not justify the campaign methodology applied. A boycott might be legitimate if clear conditions are
formulated under which relief is in sight. However, if progress is not reported, if the
corporate actor is demonized, if any form of relationship is neglected, if there is no
trust in the moral learning capabilities of the opponent, then the campaign becomes
an end in itself.
All that it currently does is insulting 283,000 employees by insinuating that they are recklessly accepting to murder infants for profits and not allowing for the possibility that some of Nestlé ’s employees are seriously concerned about infant health and nutrition.
And even if legitimate differences in the values between the critics and Nestlé exist, a
positive relationship and open dialogue can still be maintained.
As Noddings argues with a convincing example: “Dialogue is central to moral education because it always implies the question, What are you going through? […] Dialogue as described here rejects the “war model” of dialogue.
It is not debate, and its purpose is not to win an argument. It may, of course, include intervals of debate, and both participants may enjoy such intervals.
But throughout a dialogue, participants are aware of each other; they take turns as carer and cared-for, and no matter how great their ideological differences may be, they reach across the ideological gap to connect with each other.
One organization that has put aside the war model of dialogue is a group of women on opposite sides of the abortion issue; they call themselves Common Ground. […]
The purpose of Common Ground is not for each side to argue its own convictions and
effect a glorious victory over ignorant or evil opponents. Rather, the explicit primary
goal is to “reject the war model of the abortion argument and fully recognize that
human beings, not cardboard cut-outs, make up the ‘other side’”.
The women of Common Ground have described themselves as “frustrated and
heartsick at what the abortion controversy has done to traditionally female values such
as communication, compassion and empathy.”
But can an issue like abortion be resolved through communication, compassion and empathy? That question misses the whole point of the approach we are discussing here. The point of coming together in true dialogue is not always or only to persuade opponents that our own position is better justified logically and ethically than theirs. The issue may never be resolved.
The point is to create or restore relations in which natural caring will guide future discussion and protect participants from inflicting and suffering pain.
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One of the great insights I have shared with many is that all wars in history could have well been avoided if only the ant nists had learned the art of dialogue.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
“Humans who occupy the reflection, insight, and wisdom levels are less than 10% of the population.”
True. But I would do everything in my power to bring reflection, insight, and wisdom to the 90% outside the privileged circle.
There’s no ‘partial’ nirvana. Like the Buddha taught, “enlightenment is for every blade of grass …”
T.A. Balasubramanian • Thank you, Helene! Your resource finding ability is phenomenal!
It’s a great learning resource on strategy. I like this insight – the Yin and Yang of a balanced system:
A system that s only the impulses of compassion and solidarity (which Kahane calls love) will lose its competitiveness; a system that s only the impulses of resolve and purposefulness (which he calls power) will sacrifice its people heedlessly and risk its capability for growth and recovery. A mix of power and love, however, becomes a stance that a leader can hold, and this stance may, in the end, be the single most important factor in enabling a leader to accomplish great things.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
I didn’t see it the first time! You are right, recycling helps … in more ways than one.
T.A. Balasubramanian • The World Bank also has it’s deal of “casseroles” to drag behind it.
I’m just imagining the word without the c,e,r – Mary’s imp is infectious. 
T.A. Balasubramanian • ‘Clearing’ events and the recent economic crisis.
I read this article on ‘Climax Ecology’, and it brings a few insights into capitalism’s recent crisis.
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Climax Ecology is a theory first forwarded by ecologist Frederic Clements (1874-1945). It posits that given particulars of soil type, moisture, elevation, etc. the flora of a given area will, over time, tend towards a mature “climax state”, with plants of various sizes, forms, and functions fitting together in a way most adapted to the conditions of the area.
As a theory, Climax Ecology fell out of favor in the first half of the 20th century, but it enjoyed a resurgence in the ’80s and ’90s, and Tom Atzet was a part of that revival.
Tom identified six such ecologies in the Siskiyou Mountains, each with a particular set of conditions and elevation, and named for the dominant tree species of each ecology in its climax state: Tan Oak, Ponderosa Pine, Jeffrey Pine, Douglas Fir, Noble Fir, and Hemlock.
In his course, Tom put a big emphasis on the idea that you can’t know which ecology you’re observing merely from a cursory glance at the flora. The reason is because at the moment of your observation, the area that you are in may not be in its climax state.
His favorite example was the high meadows of the Siskiyou, which he liked to remind us weren’t actually meadows at all — they were hemlock forests that only looked like meadows because they had been cleared many decades earlier to graze sheep.
Now that the sheep were gone, these meadows would revert (slowly, hemlock only grows above 6,000 feet) to the forests they once were.
Over and over again, Tom cautioned us not to confuse “clearing events”– fire, disease, sheep grazing — with wholesale changes in the ecology itself. He gave us a suite of observational tools to see through whatever the current flora might be, and apprehend the underlying ecological conditions that would determine the climax state.
So a ‘clearing event’ like the breakdown of the financial system is probably a similar phenomenon – it does shake up the system, but it doesn’t change the underlying capitalist ecology.
In a mature forest, resources of sunlight, air, water, and nutrients are apportioned in a predictable way. For example, the dominant tree species get first dibs on sunlight, while the trees, shrubs, herbs, and grasses in the understory have evolved to survive on whatever filters down through the canopy.
But after a clearing event — a fire, for example — all sorts of novel things can happen. With unrestricted access to sunlight and water, understory plants may grow faster or larger, or both. They may even come to temporarily dominate a landscape, as with the grasses in the high meadows of the Siskiyou Mountains.
But what Climax Ecology says is that this can’t last. As long as the clearing event hasn’t actually changed the underlying ecological conditions, then the once-dominant species will eventually become dominant again, and the understory species will be pushed back into their normal niches.
Which means the dominant capitalism of the pre-crisis era will be back on its feet, unless there is a counter-balancing force to represent the plight of the planet’s climate degradation.
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I believe that both periods can be understood as cultural “clearing events.”
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
And guess who gave the world Powerpoint?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
These days, the good work is done … or so I hear … by ‘drones’.
Sometimes they wipe out the innocent – but it’s all just a bit of … umm … ‘collateral damage’.
It’s all getting highly refined.
http://www.suite101.com/content/drone-warfare-in-the-21st-century-a212583
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
In the present mega-cities – such as Mumbai and New York – and those of the future – where there is a high density of population, the challenge would be to go green vertically. We discussed Green Towers earlier in this thread.
Here are a few scenarios:
http://www.mumbaimania.in/2008/09/mumbai-has-20-of-green-buildings-in.html
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http://cubeme.com/blog/2007/02/21/green-towers-in-the-park-seoul-commune-2026/
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http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/05/green-roof-idea-tilts-skyward-istanbul.php
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Green Buildings in India
The number is small – but expected to grow – in 75 countries.
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Eco-friendly ‘green buildings’ catching on in India
The popularity of such eco-friendly ‘green buildings’ with their own water harvesting and solar power systems is catching on in India and the high price is no deterrent.
Green buildings also have their own water re-cycling system. More than 50 percent of the building is covered with glass – making it reflect away the sun’s rays and helping to keep the inside cool and save on electricity – among other eco-friendly measures.
Starting with a modest 20,000 sq ft green building in 2004 in Hyderabad, green buildings today account for over 235 million sq ft spread across India. Now there are 315 green buildings in India, including 250 commercial. They include IT parks, hospitals, airports and educational institutions.
Of the 315, as many as 60 green buildings – or nearly 20 percent – have come up in Mumbai alone. The remaining are in other cities of Maharashtra. The important buildings in the city are the Hiranandani BG Building, K. Raheja group, Enercon India Pvt Ltd and Kalpataru building.
The Indian Green Building Council (IGBC), a part of the Confederation of Indian Industry-Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre (CII-Godrej GBC), Hyderabad, is credited with spearheading the green building movement in India since 2001.
The CII-Godrej GBC was India’s first certified green building spread over 20,000 sq ft in Hyderabad.
‘It is growing in popularity in a big way. By 2010, we expect about 1,000 green buildings, with over one billion sq ft to come up all over India,’ S. Raghupathy, senior director and head of CII-Godrej GBC, told IANS here.
He said an average investment of Rs.500 ($ 11.32) million has to be made per building to make it ‘green’, and the total investment in green buildings would be a whopping Rs.500 ($ 11.32) billion by 2010. Green buildings cost 3-8 percent more than conventional buildings.
However, the higher cost is recovered within two-three years by the handsome savings in maintenance costs, making the concept extremely popular.
Explaining the benefits, Raghupathy said that since such buildings use natural light and air, energy savings could be up to 35 percent, while water savings can be up to 40 percent and productivity benefits up to 15 percent.
Raghupathy said the day is not far when green buildings – offering water conservation, energy optimization, use of recycled products, and renewable energy, all of which ensure environment protection – would be the accepted norm of the construction industry.
The concept, currently implemented in 75 countries, has also spurred a heavy demand for many new construction materials, equipment, systems and services, leading to a transformation of the market.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
One billion are starving. One billion are obese.
Compassionate supply chain management coupled with enlightened self-interest that treats the planet as one would treat one’s own mother.
That’s the key to a restoration economy.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
Thanks for the reference – Slow Money. It’s one more step to an ideal ‘Slow World’!
Woody Tasch has some good words for Bill Gates
(Mary will not take kindly to me after this … )
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Buffett, Gates and the Story of Enough (Woody Tasch)
Vermont Commons – January 4, 2011
“When is enough enough?” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders asked during his filibuster against the Lame Duck tax bill in December. During the speech, he referred to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the world’s richest three people.
The reference to Gates and Buffett in a speech about ‘Enough’ was a result of their project called the Giving Pledge, which encourages billionaires to give away more than half their wealth.
And while this may not seem immediately relevant to life in the hills of Hardwick or the dales of Dorset, it raises important questions about the meaning of Enough, about ways in which we might, as a society, secede from the cult of ‘He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins’ and, maybe, just maybe, about ways to put back into the soil — the soil of the restorative economy and the actual soil — what we take out.
Ask any earthworm. Here are a few data points from Earthworm Economics:
• There are some 1,000 billionaires on the planet, 400 of them American.
• In an acre of fertile soil, there are 50,000 to 2 million earthworms, none of them American. (Estimates range widely, conditions vary from hummock to swale, from Butterworks Farm to Lucky Penny Farm to Full Belly Farm. There is no Earthworm Department of the Census or Forbes list of the richest 400 earthworms.)
• 90 million acres of American cropland is devoted to corn. 75% of this goes to feed livestock and cars. Since 1776, a third of America’s topsoil has eroded.
The story of Enough is told in chapters of money, food and soil.
In the 20th century, our food and our money became fast. Our farms became factories. The erosion of our soil accelerated, as did the erosion of our sense of connection to one another and our sense of collective purpose. Our money zoomed around the planet with ever accelerating speed, increasingly complex and abstract. We raised children who thought that food came from supermarkets and investors who thought that investments came from computer screens.
We filled our land with chemicals, our portfolios with zeros and our heads with financial speculation.
In the 21st century, can philanthropy, even radically generous philanthropy of The Giving Pledge kind, come to the rescue? Can it rekindle an abiding sense of Enough?
Yes and No.
Yes, because the idea of giving away more than 50% of your money helps us all look in the direction of putting back as much as we take out. The act has about it both an air of ageless morality and a sense of modern urgency.
The Giving Pledge may or may not contain, but is consistent with, an implicit recognition that facing the global predicaments of climate change, financial volatility, social inequality and political inertia, neither economic growth based on consumerism nor philanthropy as usual will be sufficient.
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Only a precious few of us have 50% of multi-billions to give away. But many, many precious millions of us have money sitting in financial institutions, where it is under the guidance of Mr. Invisible Hand and Mr. Smokestacks In China and Mr. Slightly Better Regulated But Still Giving More Bonuses Than Ever Wall Street.
And while 1% isn’t 50%, it is an important beginning, a beautiful beginning. It is our start down the road to the world that comes after “Enough is enough.”
T.A. Balasubramanian • Velliangiri Hills
We exchange so many words and ideas – but so few pictures of the places we are in!
https://picasaweb.google.com/gtabby/TrekkingInVelliangiriHills#
This is a photo album of me and my son trekking in Velliangiri Hills – it was part of a 5-day visit to an ashram – part of a course on wellness and life – near the South Indian city of Coimbatore.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
You are in the midst of some divine landscapes.
http://www.gonorthcascades.com/
I have been to visit my sister in Philadelphia and friends in California – the countryside and the drives are deeply etched in my memory.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Stephen
Glad you liked the pictures. Yes, it would be nice to see the surroundings where each of us lives – or likes to remember most.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
Hmm … if only the world’s living problems could be solved by intellectual discourse alone. Policies created by feverish brainstorming. Elegant models and perfect theories.
Percy Bysshe Shelley has a different systems thinking approach.
“There in her mooring-place I left the bark,
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood. But after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being ; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness — call it solitude,
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields ;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.”
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
I understand your concerns about the investments that the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has made.
I don’t know the logic behind these – yet – but there are some answers in the FAQ section that indicate a deeper understanding of the issues involved:
How does biotechnology fit into the foundation’s strategy?
A: Quality seeds are key to a good harvest. However, many existing crop varieties do not grow well in the often harsh environments of the developing world, where drought can be common, a variety of diseases and pests plague crops, and many crops are grown on marginal land and offer little nutritional value.
Our work in seeds includes conventional breeding, marker-assisted breeding, and transgenic approaches to improve crops. We also support multiple channels to offer improved seeds to farmers so they can choose what is best for them.
Boosting agricultural productivity is a complex challenge with no single, simple solution. We focus on the entire agricultural value chain, from seeds and soil, to farm management, to market access, to policy. Our goal is to help small farmers gain access to the best and most appropriate tools to meet their needs.
Most of our science and technology grants use conventional breeding. We include biotechnology when we believe there is potential to help farmers confront drought, flooding, disease, or pests faster or more effectively than conventional breeding alone. The foundation also makes a number of grants, through its Global Health Program, to support biofortification—nutritionally enhanced crops that can help prevent disease and stunting.
We believe that crops improved through biotechnology must be appropriately tested, and have made several grants to strengthen the capacity of regulators, especially in Africa, so countries can make their own decisions based on the best available science and knowledge about crop performance and potential health and environmental impacts. We respect the right of countries and farmers to make their own decisions about biotechnology. All our grants meet established standards of safety and effectiveness and our grantees are required to work within the regulations and laws of the countries where they operate.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Dialogue Can Move Mountains
Taking a cue from Egypt, a Gandhi-style fast by one non-political activist, Anna Hazare, has woken up the Indian Government to deal with rampant corruption – an issue that has been boiling for s.
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Hazare wins battle
9 Apr 2011, 0951 hrs IST, AGENCIES
The government on Saturday (April 9) issued a Gazetted notification on the committee to redraft the Lokpal Bill. Swami Agnivesh today collected the government’s order on the committee to redraft Lokpal Bill from the residence of cabinet minister Kapil Sibal.
“Government has given us ‘Gazetted notification’, I congratulate Prime Minister and Ms. Sonia Gandhi for listening to the people,” Agnivesh said.
Anna will call off his fast at 10. 30 am on Saturday morning after receiving the government’s order on the committee.
Government has agreed to form a 10-member joint committee to redraft the Lokpal Bill.
The committee will have five representatives from civil society including Anna Hazare lawyers Shanti Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan, anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal and former Supreme Court judge Santosh Hegde. Lawyer and former Law Minister Shanti Bhushan will be the co-chairman of the committee.
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee will be the chairman of the committee. The other members would be Law Minister Veerappa Moily, Telecom Minister Sibal, Home Minister P Chidambaram and Water Resources Minister Salman Khurshid.
The government order has set a deadline of June 30 for the panel to complete its work so that the Bill can be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament.
The government accepted all the demands of Anna’s supporters a third round of talks between Cabinet Minister Kapil Sibal and Anna’s supporters including Kiran Bedi, Swami Agnivesh and Arvind Kejriwal on Friday evening.
Jubilant Anna on Friday night said that this is victory for entire nation.
“Democracy has won,” said Anna.
Sibal on Friday night said that the government was delighted at the fact that the government and civil society representatives have worked together. “This suggests the strength of democracy in our country that we are able to sit across the table and resolve issues which seem intractable.”
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
There’s one visionary who brings the wisdom of permaculture and technology together — co-evolving in the near future when we are forced to end the 200 year binge on fossil fuels.
John Michael Greer, aka The Archdruid, offers a ’slow unwinding’ scenario of the likely post peak oil world in ‘The Ecotechnic Future’
Greer dispels our fantasies of a tidy, controlled transition from industrial society to a post-industrial milieu. The process will be ragged and rugged and will not invariably constitute an evolutionary leap for the human species. It will, however, offer myriad opportunities to create a society that bolsters complex technology which at the same time maintains a sustainable interaction with the ecosystem.
He describes three stages the end of this age of affluence.
We can first expect an age of scarcity industrialization in which all our technology shifts towards making the most of diminishing resources. Then a salvage economy with obsolete high rises cannibalized for their steel and other highly refined products of the industrial age. Finally, after several generations, we arrive at the ‘ecotechnic future’ in which humans have learned to use appropriate technology to live within the limits of natural resources and life reaches the nirvana of sustainability.
He spends some time talking about how home economics is a now defunct college degree that we would do well to resurrect as quite a lot of things we buy out of convenience were once made in the home; this cottage industry sector being an integral part of the economy and well being of families. He recognizes how making things at home is not yet economically viable, thanks to cheap oil, but as transportation costs turn the tables, it will make more sense.
Even more illuminating is the perspective on how our financial system is an instrument that has become so complex, its chief result is to rob the population of any real wealth by sucking every investor into gross forms of speculation. I found this to be an affirming observation given that this is what’s been happening and good reason to avoid investing therein.
Greer also illustrates how our assumptions about progress are getting in the way of thinking about stability. And that our destructive high tech life is not the be and end all of civilization. Compared to the Egyptians we pale when it comes to their 3,000 years of cultural stability.
I particularly liked his insight on the tragic hero versus the comedic hero. One dies for ideology while the other manages to come through somehow largely through adaptive survival. This is the strength of the anarchist, the unreasonable in our midst who make all progress possible.
As in his first book, ‘The Long Descent,’ he emphasizes the slow unfolding of this future rather than an emergency scenario that other peak oil authors describe.
He also encourages a diversity of solutions and proposes ‘dissensus’ — a deliberate acceptance of radical diversity that widens the range of potential approaches to infinity.
Since no one can actually know what will be the scenario of the future, this decentralized diversity makes practical sense. Human societies, like ecosystems, evolve in complex and unpredictable ways, making it futile to try to impose rigid ideological forms on the patterns of evolutionary change.
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
Might be useful to align the concept of the 3 capitals with the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ framework coined by John Elkington in his 1998 book ‘Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.’
This is used a lot presently by many businesses in India, and I understand that it is gaining currency internationally – though the standards for accounting are still evolving.
The concept of TBL demands that a company’s responsibility lies with stakeholders rather than shareholders. In this case, “stakeholders” refers to anyone who is influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the actions of the firm.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line
The triple bottom line is made up of “social, economic and environmental” the “people, planet, profit” phrase was coined for Shell by SustainAbility, influenced by 20th century urbanist Patrick Geddes’s notion of ‘folk, work and place’.
“People, planet and profit” succinctly describes the triple bottom lines and the goal of sustainability.
> “People” (human capital) pertains to fair and beneficial business practices toward labour and the community and region in which a corporation conducts its business. A TBL company conceives a reciprocal social structure in which the well-being of corporate, labour and other stakeholder interests are interdependent.
> “Planet” (natural capital) refers to sustainable environmental practices. A TBL company endeavors to benefit the natural order as much as possible or at the least do no harm and curtail environmental impact. A TBL endeavor reduces its ecological footprint by, among other things, carefully managing its consumption of energy and non-renewables and reducing manufacturing waste as well as rendering waste less toxic before disposing of it in a safe and legal manner.
Currently, the cost of disposing of non-degradable or toxic products is borne financially by governments and environmentally by the residents near the disposal site and elsewhere. In TBL thinking, an enterprise which produces and markets a product which will create a waste problem should not be given a free ride by society. It would be more equitable for the business which manufactures and sells a problematic product to bear part of the cost of its ultimate disposal.
Ecologically destructive practices, such as overfishing or other endangering depletions of resources are avoided by TBL companies. Often environmental sustainability is the more profitable course for a business in the long run. Arguments that it costs more to be environmentally sound are often specious when the course of the business is analyzed over a period of time.
> “Profit” is the economic value created by the organisation after deducting the cost of all inputs, including the cost of the capital tied up. It therefore differs from traditional accounting definitions of profit. In the original concept, within a sustainability framework, the “profit” aspect needs to be seen as the real economic benefit enjoyed by the host society. It is the real economic impact the organization has on its economic environment. This is often confused to be limited to the internal profit made by a company or organization (which nevertheless remains an essential starting point for the computation). Therefore, an original TBL approach cannot be interpreted as simply traditional corporate accounting profit plus social and environmental impacts unless the “profits” of other entities are included as a social benefits.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Perhaps we should take up one model at a time – since there are different perspectives from different people with different sets of assumptions.
I don’t know if it is even possible to have a one-size-fits-all solution for sustainability – its possible that every country – ranging from Bhutan with its Happiness Index to China with its centralized ideology-based planning – would have to make its own path by walking.
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
There are some companies with a ‘clear and present’ vision of sustainability – centered on the TBL concepts but going well beyond those markers.
Ekanath
Yes, WEF is part of the ecosystem. Sustainability is still a new concept for business, and business environments are diverse.
One example of applied sustainability that I felt was articulated particularly well – a carpet-manufacturing company led by Ray Anderson.
There’s a 7-step process outlined – on the sustainability journey:
http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Our-Journey/7-Fronts-of-Sustainability.aspx
And a deep ecology framework – called ‘interface model’ – that I have not seen worked out as clearly in any other business.
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http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Our-Journey/Interface-Model.aspx
Early in our journey, we began to get a sense of the full breadth of changes a commitment to sustainability would bring. The most basic drawing of a contemporary corporation — its vision, its processes, its ways of doing business — simply does not include sustainability. Reaching and maintaining sustainability meant Interface would need to evolve into an organization of an entirely different kind of design.
There was no blueprint for this kind of organization in business. But there was in nature. If nature designed an industrial process, what might it look like? How could we translate the operations of nature into a model for a business?
Nature has some fundamental operating principles: it runs on sunlight and other renewable energy sources, it fits form to function, it recycles everything and it is extremely efficient — never creating excess or wasting — and, finally, it rewards cooperation. Our job was to translate these principles into a new model for business. To begin with, it meant that we would become a business that runs on renewable energy. We would carefully eliminate waste from all areas of our operations and recycle and then reuse the materials from our products and those that support our business. We would find a use for everything we use and waste nothing. And finally, we, too, would reward cooperation — with suppliers, customers, investors and our communities.
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And a step-by-step analysis of the transformation:
> Moving from Typical to Sustainable: The Starting Point
http://www.interfaceglobal.com/getdoc/cc735ac4-e244-4c73-b3cb-adc277d58e1f/The-Starting-Point.aspx
> The Interface Model: Eliminating Damaging Linkages
> The Interface Model: Introducing Sustainable Linkages
> The Interface Model: Prototypical Company of the 21st Century
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Anderson’s remarkable business sustainability vision is also included in a book ‘Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model’
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T.A. Balasubramanian • David
I have also been the insights from Fritjof Capra and Lester Brown to get a more holistic perspective. Capra has influenced a whole generation of planetary systems thinkers, including Rifkin and Deepak Chopra.
insights from Fritjof Capra and Lester Brown to get a more holistic perspective http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/new-facts-life
The Interface Model and its internal philosophy – in Anderson’s interview here:
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
In my innovation workshops, we have a simple flow discipline – one conversation at a time! Multiple conversations create too much of cross-currents and noise – and tend to scare away a lot of people.
This is to help participants who have different ways of saying and doing things to come forward and get supported by the group – the group becomes a body of ‘committed listeners’. The presenter is given full freedom to express herself in any way comfortable.
So I suggest that the more recent voices – Kent, Dawna, Thorbjoern – who have joined the conversation be given something of this nature – one presentation at a time that we can all respectfully – and non-judgmentally listen to and respond to.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
I can understand the overload! I will help in assimilating the learnings from whatever I have been gathering – though its going to take some time!
I’m also working on several parallel ideas:
> Developing the Capra-Brown model as a basic ST tool – which includes Global Capitalism and Corporate Growth as two linked critical components in the sustainability – to visualize the situation on CMaps – including some of the stream of insights from this thread
> Exploring industry examples – as with the Anderson Interface Model – of sustainability systems design visualized as ‘journeys’ from existing to future desirable imbalance states of sustainable growth.
> Also, how do such visionary ‘journeys’ fit into systems thinking? Can we generate eutopias for different industries and different states of industrial maturity from the present to transition them smoothly into future sustainable states? Maybe the UN plan is one such eutopian vision?
> How does Natural Capitalism provide a journey roadmap for such transitions? Or other models like Philanthropic Capitalism (a la Bill Gates)?
> Metrics and measurement systems – Exergy, Emergy, Energy as energy models – how do these compare to the evolving triple bottom line metrics? Ultimately sustainability will have to be measured and given real values if it is to mean something!
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
I loved the redwood forest – in two trips, we took a steam train ride and came away awe-stricken each time.
Your love of permaculture and your passion to see it grow reminds me of Johnny Appleseed – and this story. The Red Delicious apples are all over Mumbai – from street-side vendors to the big retail shops – round the year.
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Samuel Evans Stokes : Apples Gift to Himachal
Apple growers in India’s Western Himalayas still remember Samuel Evans Stokes, the American who brought the fruit to their land a century . Stokes went to India to teach and ended up staying there to learn. Stokes’ granddaughter tells his story in a new book, An American in Gandhi’s India.
Samuel Evan Stokes, 21, came to India with the intention of working at a home for lepers in the Simla hills. He married a local pahari girl, played an active role in India’s freedom struggle and was even jailed by the British. Somewhere along the way, he introduced apple crop in the hills around Shimla.
In 1904, Stokes arrived in India and started working in that leper home in the Himalayan foothills. He quickly realized that the people there needed help to fight not only disease, but poverty as well.Samuel Evans Stokes came to India as a missionary and ended up a Hindu, fighting for India’s freedom Samuel Evans Stokes came to India in 1904 as a missionary and ended up a Hindu, fighting for India’s freedom.
It was during a visit to America in 1915 that Samuel Stokes heard about the new strain of apples patented by the Stark Brothers nursery in Louisiana called the Red Delicious. He bought a few saplings and planted them at his Barobagh orchard in Thanedar in the winter of 1916. Five years later his mother sent him a consignment of saplings of the Stark Brothers Golden Delicious Apples as a Christmas gift. The first apples bore fruit a few years later and were sold in 1926.
“He saw that people in very poor condition “They didn’t have clothes to wear. They didn’t have meals to eat. They would have tea with salt. Then he thought that he could try growing fruits in that area. Somehow the idea of apples came to his mind.
“In 1916, he brought the first apple trees from Philadelphia to the Shimla Hills.He distributed them [the apple seeds] free to the local people and helped them to plant and nurture them. That was a start of an economic revolution in that area.”it wasn’t easy for Stokes to convince local farmers to start planting apple trees.
“An apple tree takes about six to seven years to grow. “And he would tell people to grow the apple trees, and they would say, ‘If we plant the trees, where will we grow our food crops? And what will we eat?’ It was a battle for him in the beginning, but he succeeded and gradually the people began to grow apple trees. That’s why he’s called the ‘Johnny Appleseed of the Himalayas.’ And people still remember him for that.”
“The struggle for right and fair play in the relations of men,” he observed, “is a fight worth fighting.” Though Stokes conceded that many of his dreams of service had met with only “imperfect realization,” he added, “yet the dreams were something.”
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Dawna
We are all ears. You have so much to share, and I for one would love to listen.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
I would like to listen to what Dawna has to say and take time to reflect and understand her insights.
Why are we in such a tearing hurry to reduce everything to a 20-page summary that would impress the UN? Are we here on a time-bound mission subordinated to a set of UN directives?
T.A. Balasubramanian • “Diversity is not the end in itself. It is not just about being friends. It is about being allies and becoming effective agents of change. To work effectively as an agent of change in a pluralistic society, it is necessary to be able to connect with people different from oneself… meaningful engagement is an important step, a prerequisite for the transformative learning we need for a more ecologically sensitive society.”
Beverly Daniel Tatum (2003) “Why do all the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria”
I found this quote while reading in a different context, but it made me aware that it would take patience and time to learn to become effective agents of change. Action without reflection – and without building up ‘meaningful engagement’ – is precisely what has created the present situation.
T.A. Balasubramanian • I agree with Mary – there is no one-size-fit-all solution.
I live in the world’s second most densely populated megapolis – and sometimes it seems almost close to what a 10 billion people crowded planet may look like by the end of the century.
I live in the relatively less crowded suburbs, but there are pockets in Mumbai where you are literally living cheek-to-cheek with neighbors within shanties with wafer-thin walls packed like an endless row of oversize matchboxes.
Dharavi is the celebrated Mumbai neighborhood in which some of the spectacular scenes of Danny Boyle’s movie were shot, including the anti-Muslim riots of 1992. Rather than name an actual location, the movie constructs a cinematic slum out of many pockets around Mumbai.
This imagery represents what most residents in Mumbai (and now all over the world) imagine Dharavi to be. The image has taken root because few of them have ever been there. It is the same reason why most Manhattanites avoid stepping near Bed-Stuy, that beautiful and vibrant neighborhood in Brooklyn. Times might have changed since Barry Stein described it as the “largest ghetto in the US” but old prejudices die hard.
Likewise, the slum imagery does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Don’t expect to see the familiar clichés about urban poverty here. Well over a million “eyes on the street”, to use Jane Jacobs’ phrase, keep Dharavi safer than most US cities. Yet, Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into an oppressive feeling. The crowd is efficiently absorbed in the thousands of tiny streets branching into bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see depressed people loitering. Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an already incredibly industrious city.
What you will see however are piles of garbage uncollected by municipal authorities. These are favored by a certain brand of photo-reporters and slum tourists.
People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state – including the setting up of a highly functional waste recycling industry that serves the whole city.
This resourcefulness has aroused the curiosity of people from all over the world. They cannot get their head around this phenomenon, which in sixty years emerged out of marshlands to become a multi-million dollar economic miracle that provides fresh food to Mumbai and exports crafts and manufactured goods to places as far as Sweden.
No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the success of Dharavi. It was entirely built by successive waves of immigrants who moved there in response to rural poverty, political oppression or natural disasters. They managed to produce a place that is far from perfect but has proved to be amazingly resilient and able to upgrade itself.
In the words of its resident-activist Bhau Korde – “Dharavi is an economic success story that the world must pay attention to during these times of global depression.” The fact that it developed with internal resources, through the sheer resourcefulness of its inhabitants is something truly special.
Not surprisingly an increasing number of students, researchers, activists and writers are feeding off Dharavi to produce new concepts, participatory methodologies and architectural systems. They come not to help poor people but to learn from Dharavi.
The Net Generation in particular recognizes itself in the story of this self-developing city, which is powered by the collective intelligence and individual aspirations of hundreds of thousands of people.
Development, amazingly, is in fact the main driving principle of Dharavi. Its apparently messy organization is not a problem in itself but rather an expression of intensive social and economic processes at work. In an age of complexity, artificial intelligence and wiki-logic, this should be self-evident.
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
I mentioned Dharavi only to show that sustainability has an immense variety of possible configurations – whether it comes about spontaneously in the midst of seeming chaos – as in the slums and ghettos of the world, or in more orderly ways through the experiments of enlightened corporate leaders like Anderson of Interface.
People have learned to respond in creative ways to the conditions of life into which they are thrown.
You are spot on with ‘open systems’ – that’s where lessons in new concepts, participatory methodologies and architectural systems are evolving.
And like Helene and Kent point out, maybe a wiki that can capture ideas and insights and terminologies in an on-going format. I don’t see the need for closure – sustainability is a never-ending planetary challenge.
It’s also not just about projecting into the future – the primary task is about cleaning up the mess created by nearly 300 years of ecological abuse in the name of industrialization and monoculture and neglecting the accumulation of planetary garbage.
In fact, I’d say that cleaning up is 99 percent of the job – maybe for the next 20 years. The capitalist fossil economy has given us a world of enormous convenience – and enormous long-term pollution.
T.A. Balasubramanian • John
To use a restaurant analogy, more of a ‘buffet system’ than an ‘open system’ if you like – the ‘open’ terminology is a crossover, so it might cause confusion.
In my view, what we need to keep building – maybe as a dynamic wiki – is an extensive toolkit of working solutions and models taken from the hundreds of ‘experimental’ sustainability solutions around us – like Mary suggests – from permaculture – and from organizations and institutions that are doing things in this domain.
I don’t see any reason why we can’t mix and match – and innovate from scratch, if there’s nothing in the buffet.
There will be opportunities for actionable projects as we go along – and as others come in with fresh insights. I just don’t feel that there’s a burning need to force action before a due process of reflection.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Stephen
“Plants need only specific wavelengths of light to grow, but in nature they must adapt to the full range of light as a matter of survival. When light and other natural elements are manipulated, the plants become more efficient, using less energy to grow.”
I liked the Yahoo news item on urban farming – sans light. Amazes me that LEDs can support plant growth – and make them more efficient. It made me see plants in a ‘new light’ – literally!
As I understand it, a particular advantage of the systems thinking approach is that it helps to create a learning community based upon the ability to access knowledge to redirect, facilitate and encourage innovative approaches in development projects.
What you shared is a good example of accessible knowledge that has transformative value. It’s now a valuable part of my systems thinking toolkit – and it opens a door for action when I most would need it.
I have nothing against action when there is a clarity of likely outcomes – including the positive and negative results. With the messy problematic situations that arise in human activities, all I’m saying is that it is far more difficult to anticipate outcomes that are distant in time and connection.
Who would have thought that advances in agriculture would lead to an unsustainable population explosion? Who would have thought fossil fuels would lead to global warming? At the time these critical actions were taken, maybe there was no systems thinking to speak of.
But the world is a different place today – we can see the folly of committing to one or the other way – as with nuclear energy – and even with the foreknowledge of negative outcomes, still choose to go down the tunnel – after due reflection.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Thorbjoern
“My point is that the very behaviors we deplore as destructive are rooted in habits and views that are widely accepted as desirable and admirable.”
Wonderfully articulated. I think you have pointed out something truly transformative here.
Every B-School that has ever drafted a management program has placed ‘competitive advantage’ as a desirable virtue for corporations – while in reality, it is precisely the same behavior that has pushed ecological sensitivity into the backyard.
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
In responding to natural environment sustainability, it’s more than an economic sustainability response … but also social and value based: A full spectrum.
You’re absolutely right – absorb the best of all worlds. The UNDP, for example, has distilled the learning of many generations of field research workers and offers guidelines and markers for sustainable development programs that are reflective of the ground realities in each country they have started projects in.
This is a good example.
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Indicators of Sustainable Development: Guidelines and Methodologies
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I think learnings from sporadic and experimental projects as well as from large nation-level interventions are equally valuable templates. How we mix and match them to emerging situations is entirely up to our team’s imagineers!
T.A. Balasubramanian • Kent
Thanks for the link to Tex Albert’s forum (wiseearth). We should evolve something like that from this thread. It has all the features of a blog and a wiki – and a documented subject-focused chat forum.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Fixing the Future – a one-hour PBS special show.
http://www.pbs.org/now/fixing-the-future/
David Brancaccio visits communities across America using innovative approaches to create jobs and build prosperity in the new economy. He also discuses timebanking, a bartering system through which people exchange time and services with one another.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
I don’t usually push for vegetarianism, since people are so touchy about their food preferences – but since you’re on the fence, here’s something that might help! I don’t recommend ‘vegan’ [avoidance of all animal source products - like dairy products - altogether] however.
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Vegetarian diet may reduce risks for serious health problems
A new US study suggests that vegetarians may be at significantly lower risk of developing a condition associated with heart disease, diabetes, and stroke than people who eat meat.
Announced April 13, researchers found that vegetarians (those who eat meat of any kind less than once a month) experience a 36 percent lower prevalence of metabolic syndrome, a precursor to heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, than non-vegetarians. To measure metabolic syndrome, researchers tested for five risk factors: high blood pressure, high HDL cholesterol, high glucose levels, elevated triglycerides, and an unhealthy waist circumference. The benefits of the herbivore diet also held up when adjusted for factors such as age, smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity.
“I was not sure if there would be a significant difference between vegetarians and non-vegetarians, and I was surprised by just how much the numbers contrast,” said lead researcher Nico S. Rizzo, PhD, of Loma Linda University in the US. “It indicates that lifestyle factors such as diet can be important in the prevention of metabolic syndrome.”
A study published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry earlier this year also found that meat eaters had significantly higher cardiovascular risk factors than vegetarians, although it also revealed that a vegan diet, which eliminates all animal products, may increase people’s risk of blood clots and the hardening of arteries – conditions that can lead to heart attacks and strokes.
Researchers in the vegan study noted that strict vegan diets tend to lack key nutrients like iron, zinc, vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids, which can lower the risk of heart-related diseases. Vegetarians and vegans can ensure the health benefits of their diets by filling their plates with good sources of omega-3 fatty acids, such as walnuts, flaxseeds, and for vegetarians, omega-3 enriched eggs.
The new study is published in the March issue of American Diabetes Association’s journal Diabetes Care
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Stephen
I am looking for some way of developing a “push” function…perhaps a wiki+website+spammail program+intelligence dashboard
Gene has something close to what you have in mind:
http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/
Perhaps we could use this forum? Gene, is it possible to have an ‘open blog’ format with the character of a wiki …?
Any suggestions from anybody?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Thanks to our persistent ecology bravehearts Mary and Dan, I have been looking at the perils of monoculture and trying to get different perspectives on what people around the world are doing by pottering around through current news reports and articles.
Amazing how much you can learn this way!
This caught my attention.
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http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4224
Diversity in the food system
Vanessa Arcara & Jules Pretty
April 11, 2011
Pests and diseases thrive in monocultures. But even in small areas, say Vanessa Arcara and Jules Pretty, a mixture of crops can produce a range of benefits — and remarkable synergies.
During the 1970s, rice paddies from India to Indonesia were threatened by grassy stunt virus. After a five-year search in which over 17,000 cultivated and wild rice samples were screened, a wild species Oryza nivara, growing near Gonda in Uttar Pradesh, was found that contained a single gene for resistance to a grassy stunt virus strain. Today, resistant rice hybrids containing the wild Indian gene are grown across some 110,000 square kilometres of Asian rice fields.
More recently, the cassava mosaic virus spread in Uganda in the 1990s, diminishing harvests by 70 to 100%. The brown streak virus then infected another 10% of the cassava crops in the region. Through three innovations, local research stations working with farmers developed improved disease-free cassava planting material and extended improved cultivation methods and post-harvest processing to large numbers of farmers.
These examples suggest one vital role of genetic diversity: maintaining a gene “tool kit” that can be tapped to counter various threats to crop production. Yet during the twentieth century, some 75% of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops was lost. Only about 150 plant species are now widely cultivated, of which just three supply almost 60% of calories derived from plants. The trend has been rapidly downward in many countries, and one result is dietary impoverishment. In four out of 10 countries recently surveyed, more than one third of children were stunted due to insufficient and poor-quality food, with deficiencies of key vitamins and minerals most common.
Worldwide, two billion people suffer from iron-deficiency anemia, including three quarters of pregnant women in south-west Asia, half in Africa, one third in the Americas, and one quarter in Europe. Anemia causes 65,000 maternal deaths per year in Asia, and severe vitamin A deficiency affects 100 million to 250 million children worldwide.
One key to reversing this trend is restoring biological diversity on farms. Rice paddies, for instance, were traditionally important sources of fish protein, and fish living in the paddies helped cycle nutrients and control pests. But many insecticides are toxic to fish, and their increased use since the 1960s eliminated beneficial fish from paddies. Pests and diseases thrive in monocultures because there is an abundance of food and few or no natural enemies to check their growth. In the end, pesticide resistance inevitably develops within populations and spreads rapidly unless farmers are able to use new products.
Take the insecticides away, though, and the fish can be reintroduced. This was done in China’s Jiangsu province; the result was rapid growth of rice aquaculture, from about 5,000 hectares in 1994 to 117,000 hectares in 2001 of rice/fish, rice/crab and rice/shrimp systems. Rice yields increased by 10 to 15%, but the greatest dividend was in protein: each mu (one fifteenth of a hectare) produced 50 kilogrammes of fish. Additional benefits included reduced insecticide use and measured reductions in malaria incidence owing to fish predation of mosquito larvae.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Gene
Just a thought – I like the blog [http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/] because it has a facility for chain posting by subject, date, tagging, linking, comments, blogroll, adding visuals and graphics with text etc.
What if we took up individual projects needing more focused attention – out of this thread and continued in the blog? I presume the blog is a free site, too?
Stephen, Helene – what do you think?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Gene
Thank you. Let me know how to log on. I’ll create a few topics from this thread and see how it works out.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Some insights on how cities are coping with explosive growth.
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A world of seven billion
http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4226-A-world-of-seven-billion-2-
Leo Hickman
April 12, 2011
Dr Tim Jones, the British author of Future Agenda, believes that by 2050, 75% of us will be living in cities. “The major trend we need to grasp is rural-urban migration,” he says. “To put it simply, people are largely in the wrong place at the moment. They want to move where they perceive there to be opportunities. This means large cities. Immigration is a difficult political subject at the moment all over the world, but I believe migration will ultimately come to be seen in a positive light as the realisation is finally made that immigrants are a necessity to maintain ageing populations.”
Our greatest challenge, says Jones, is to build cities that address the realities of rapid growth: “Sprawl is already being rejected as a deeply inefficient model for growing cities. Hong Kong and Paris are good examples where densities are key to success. They are seen as successful cities. For example, just 5% of Hong Kong’s personal income is spent on transportation, whereas in Houston it is 20% because everyone drives such huge distances commuting.
“Paris, with its six- and seven-storey housing, open spaces and street-based cafe culture is a model to aspire to. The Japanese are also role models when it comes to living densities. We must aspire to be like them. For example, we can’t let China shoot past Japan and attempt to live like the Americans.”
The gap between the world’s rich and poor will worsen, he says, but that doesn’t mean they will be forced apart geographically. “Residents within the world’s megacities are already realising that they are all interdependent. In Mumbai, the rich want the inner-city slums to remain because they want the cheap labour close by. Equally, when slum dwellers have been given land on the outskirts of the city to tempt them away from the inner-city slums, many people have sold the land and moved back to the slum areas because they are closer to the work.”
When it comes to consumption levels, Jones says there are already clear innovations emerging that will help to ease this problem. “The desire to own something is likely to reduce with rental of goods becoming more and more popular. We’re seeing this in cities with car [sharing] schemes.”
The rise of the city will also have a huge impact on geopolitics, predicts Jones, with some megacities wielding far more power than many nation-states. “Already we are seeing that the C40 [a group of large cities committed to tackling climate change] is having more impact than the G20. I see far more political action being enacted by city mayors in the future.”
Çaglar Keyder, a professor of sociology at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, agrees that the citizens of Istanbul are very proud of their city’s rise, but growth has not come without some problems: “There has been rapid urban regeneration; knocking down shanties and putting people in high-rises. Retired, older people are moving further out and the young are moving in, but birth rates are falling. Traffic and environmental pollution is where the growth is most felt.”
Carl Haub has been counting the world’s people for the last three decades. The Conrad Taeuber chair of population information at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC and author of the World Population Data Sheet, an internationally respected annual report that provides environmental indicators for more than 200 countries, he has near-total recall of the myriad figures that underpin 2011’s seven-billion landmark.
“In terms of future growth, everything depends on the birth rates in developing nations,” he says. “There is a presumption that the global average will come down to less than two children per woman after 2050, but there are big question marks about this.”
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Gene
We’ll have to live with LinkedIn’s present structure, I guess. I would be nice to have tagging and html links from inside posts, though.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Rolf
Thanks for the excellent reference guides from UNEP. Is there any country-specific study as well? The modeling here is all generic and rather abstract.
I was looking for sustainability modeling references, and this seems to be a good source.
http://computingforsustainability.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/thirty-more-sustainability-diagrams/
Computing for Sustainability – Saving the earth one byte at a time
T.A. Balasubramanian • Pouvons-nous parler en anglais s’il vous plaît?
C’est une question de politesse.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
I’m thinking of collecting your sub-threads (one broad subject head could be ‘Permaculture’ – any others you can think of?) under a series of subject heads and putting them in with tags in the blog that Gene has set up earlier: [http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/]
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
Vous êtes un ange contenu magique de découverte!
The KPMG link was really good. The case references to companies like P&G are very useful in building a profile of what businesses are doing in their journeys to sustainability.
As for doomsday trends, we have Nostradamus – the patron saint of all doomsday prophets to thank. They provide much needed balance to the optimists – and sometimes unintended comic relief.
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http://www.gadgetoff.com/weblog/2009/02/the_end_is_near.html
Robert Frost pondered just two theories in “Fire and Ice”:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
Why the migration call? Although I’m a bird sitting right next to the Tropic of Cancer here in Mumbai, I think ice would be perfect for your dream Systems Thinking commune!
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http://othervoicespoetry.org/vol26/beynon/index.html
In This Place
In this place, silence has a voice
wide-ranging as the continent.
Some say its on the cusp
of madness, the way it hums
and stutters, mutters to itself
in quietest tones.
In this place, the universe
brims. Inside absence,
presence. Inside distance,
dust and our sleeping earth
dreaming beneath her thin blue
mask of ice.
In this place, the necessity
of memory, recollections
of a loved ones face
shape of laughter, weight
of breath.
In this place, nostalgia
roams, patient as slow
hands on skin, transparent
as melt-water. Nights are light
and long. Shadows settle
on the shoulders of air.
Time steps out of line
here, stops to thaw
the frozen hearts of icebergs.
Sleep isnt always easy in this place
where the sun stays up all night
and silence has a voice.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
So we have for your list:
Permaculture
Forest Gardening (includes making bio-intensive home lawns?)
Urban Agriculture
Agro-ecology (pending more information)
Portable Gardens
You can keep adding or enriching. I’ll start you off with these.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Prof. John
Vlad has a dream of setting up a free-style ST community, so we keep tossing around various possible idyllic locations.
T.A. Balasubramanian • I’m just putting down the categories – please add or correct the descriptors if need be:
Mary
- Permaculture
- Forest Gardening (includes making bio-intensive home lawns?)
- Urban Agriculture
- Agro-ecology (pending more information)
- Portable Gardens
Stephen
- Earth sheltered housing including UBS/Khali sandbag construction
- Living Roofs..
- Arkecology ( growing veg. indoors w/out sunlight)
- Solar/Hydro/Methane power
- BFI ( Bio French Intensive ) and Hydroponic
Thorbjoern
- Multi-utility design?
- Domestic wind/solar generators
T.A. Balasubramanian • Adding to the list
Vlad
* International Communities
Time for a break!
Here’s a lovely interlude (about 10 minutes of blissful jazz)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVkdteiniAQ
“Siberian Jazz Project” With Ted Curson. 1996
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Sorry Vlad, my erroneous zones are active today …
“Intentional Communities” it is.
Mary (Wow, you are prolific! I need your help in adding notes for some of these – like “cob” )
Housing
- Earthships
- Rammed-Earth
- Passive Solar
- PassiveHaus (net zero or better)
- NetZero, by itself
- the yearly solar house competition at the Smithsonian
- Co-Housing (a sort of commune with more defined boundaries than in the 70’s)
- Nader Khalili’s wonderful ceramic houses
- cob
- wattle-and-daub
- adobe
- yurts (you can rent one from Oregon at the coast)
- Prairie houses (Frank Lloyd Wright)
- tree houses
Garden
- re-forestation
- floating solar
- sprouting
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Folks, I’m going to set up these sub-categories (and sub-subs) under each of your names [as the main category] and look forward to your filling in the details (I’ll go nuts doing all of it!) – you can post these to me or directly turn into bloggers and post on WordPress using passwords that Gene would be happy to provide.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Sustainability in 7 – The fastest introduction to Systems Thinking
“The Designers Accord Sustainability in 7 video series delivers a daily dose of design inspiration by today’s leading sustainability experts. Join in the conversation as they share 7 things every designer should consider when integrating sustainability into design practice.”
I like the quick recap here of the elements of ST – a gentle reminder of what this forum is all about!
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Happy Earth Day, Folks!
http://alfoart.com/green_planet_1.html
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http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-history-movement
Earth Day: The History of A Movement
Each year, Earth Day — April 22 — marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
The height of hippie and flower-child culture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Protest was the order of the day, but saving the planet was not the cause. War raged in Vietnam, and students nationwide increasingly opposed it.
Much like 1970, Earth Day 2010 came at a time of great challenge for the environmental community. Climate change deniers, well-funded oil lobbyists, reticent politicians, a disinterested public, and a divided environmental community all contributed to a strong narrative that overshadowed the cause of progress and change. In spite of the challenge, for its 40th anniversary, Earth Day Network reestablished Earth Day as a powerful focal point around which people could demonstrate their commitment. Earth Day Network brought 225,000 people to the National Mall for a Climate Rally, amassed 40 million environmental service actions toward its 2012 goal of A Billion Acts of Green®, launched an international, 1-million tree planting initiative with Avatar director James Cameron and tripled its online base to over 900,000 community members.
The fight for a clean environment continues in a climate of increasing urgency, as the ravages of climate change become more manifest every day. We invite you to be a part of Earth Day and help write many more victories and successes into our history.
Discover energy you didn’t even know you had. Feel it rumble through the grassroots under your feet and the technology at your fingertips. Channel it into building a clean, healthy, diverse world for generations to come.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
Business is not what it used to be. In the past year, every company we work with has been looking at adding a ‘green belt’ to its bottom-line.
One example: http://www.unilever.com/sustainability/
T.A. Balasubramanian • This is a useful roadmap for sustainability project planning – primarily for enterprises, but the ideas are relevant for any kind of sustainability initiatives:
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http://www.pegasuscom.com/levpoints/7blunders.html
Overcoming the Seven Sustainability Blunders
by Bob Doppelt
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary, Vlad
Of the 7 blunders, this one got me.
Blunder 4: Confusion over Cause and Effect
The prevailing mental models held by most executives lead them to focus on the symptoms, not the true sources, of sustainability challenges. Organizations spend millions to mitigate emissions and discharges, never recognizing that these are the results, not the causes, of their problems. Emissions and discharges stem from the ways processes and products are designed and the kinds of toxic materials, chemicals, and energy used to make them. Pollution controls temporarily mask these problems and keep organizations focused on managing effects rather than on designing out root causes.
James has it spot on. “We need to organize the human mind. Our political process and the economies will follow suit.”
T.A. Balasubramanian • Australia has some good sustainability projects in the works already.
http://www.awmc.uq.edu.au/water-recycling/7_barriers.jpg
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http://www.awmc.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=102119&pid=0
Water Recycling Research Program
South East Queensland (SEQ) is the fastest growing region in Australia, which, coupled with the worst drought on record, resulted in stored water supplies declining from 64% in April 2004 to less than 17% in August 2007 (recovered to 46% by January 2009).
This has highlighted the need to secure the regional water supply and resulted in a $2.5 Billion AUD infrastructure project to diversify the drinking water supply by both closing the urban water cycle and implementing seawater desalination in another $1.2 Billion AUD project.
The Western Corridor Recycled Water Project (WCRWP) is intended to supplement drinking water using a 7-barrier system to ensure the highest water quality is supplied to the SEQ population. This planned indirect potable reuse project purifies the treated water from wastewater treatment plants by microfiltration, reverse osmosis and advanced oxidation prior to supplementation of the water supply dams (an environmental barrier).
T.A. Balasubramanian • “We need to organize the human mind”
It’s also called discovering commonsense. Not very common, as it turns out.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Speech Acts and the Sustainability Promises of Business
Fernando Flores, Founder, Action Technologies, and former Cabinet Minister, Chile offers a special definition of ’speech acts’ – as distinct from just talk.
“Talk all you want to, but if you want to act powerfully, you need to master ’speech acts’: language rituals that build trust between colleagues and customers, word practices that open your eyes to new possibilities. Speech acts are powerful because most of the actions that people engage in — in business, in marriage, in parenting — are carried out through conversation.”
I believe that corporations that go public consistently with their promises are genuine in their intentions to go up the sustainability path. Like Interface Founder and Chairman, Ray Anderson, there are others willing to take the journey.
So what are the ’speech acts’ that business heads are making to pay homage to sustainability in terms of real promises – that go beyond PR announcements?
One current example. (There’s even a ‘Chief Sustainability Officer’ on board here!)
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http://www.prweb.com/releases/Woodmeister1to1/042210/prweb3907684.htm
Woodmeister Master Builders Announces Commitment to Preserve One Foot of Forest for Each Foot it Builds
April 22, 2010
Award-winning homebuilder declares its 1:1 Sustainable Commitment on Earth Day
Today, on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Woodmeister Master Builders (award-winning provider of fine residential construction, custom cabinetry and interiors, and lifestyle management services), announced The Woodmeister 1:1 Sustainable Commitment — the company’s pledge to preserve one square foot of native, forest land for every square foot of new buildings it constructs or remodels.
Within the past calendar year (2009-2010), Woodmeister Master Builders completed 88,313 square feet of construction work on residences across the Northeastern U.S.—from Maine to New York City; in Rhode Island, and on Massachusetts homes in Metro Boston, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and elsewhere.
In support of its 1:1 Sustainable Commitment (announced today,) Woodmeister will permanently preserve 2.03 acres of conservation forest—an amount equal to its construction footage. This natural, wooded acreage will sequester a total of 41,366.60 pounds of CO2 every year — the equivalent of 2,010.71 gallons of gasoline saved annually!
“Since the forest protected through our One-to-One Sustainable Commitment can never be developed, the environmental benefits it creates will continue forever,” said Daniel Paquette, Chief Sustainability Officer, Woodmeister Master Builders. “Woodmeister’s One-to-One Commitment is the expression of our belief that home builders should do what they can to be environmentally responsible — and to proactively pursue a commonsense approach to sustainable construction.”
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Neal
Umm … it might be the other way round … Genes have a huge investment in continuing the dumb charade called human civilization. One of the scripts invented by the Selfish Gene would be called ’scientific thinking’ – which homo ’sap’ gets to follow – including the indoctrination called ‘physics’ – and delusions like the Second Law?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
Then again, nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ – is clueless about our notions of cruelty – or for that matter, kindness.
To cite Dawkins – in this fascinating interview
http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/dawk-frame.html
“The phrase “the selfish gene” only means that genes are selfish. It doesn’t mean that individual organisms are. On the contrary, one of the main messages of the selfish gene is that selfish genes can program altruistic behavior in organisms. Organisms can behave altruistically towards other organisms — the better to forward the propagation of their own selfish genes. What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.”
T.A. Balasubramanian • SystemsWiki Flow
I have been trying out various ways to capture the key points of this thread on the SystemsWiki blog, and here’s what I think might work (early stab at a solution, so please bear with my goofs and correct them!)
This scheme is based on post ’summaries’ as explained below.
Gene – would it be possible to re-open the ‘Comments’ facility so people can post views?
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The main category added to the blog is “Sustainability”
> 1. The original prompt [Helene's question] kicks off the blog:
http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/?p=285
> Subject Header: UN call for revolutionary thinking and action to ensure an economic model for survival… How to make this happen? [with the text]
> Categories: Leadership & Management, Organizational Change, Project Management, Sustainability, Systems Thinking
> Tagged with: business, climate change, Davos, development, economic model, energy, food, global perspective, Helene, lifestyle, politics, society, survival, Sustainability, UN, water, WEF
Note: ‘Helene’ is included in the tags – so would each poster’s name be included in their post summaries.
> 2. Individual post summaries that collectively present views related to Helene’s question – I have created one example with David’s early inputs
http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/?tag=sustainability
> Subject Header: UN call – Sustainability – David Alman
This header would be David’s tag – connecting to the main theme “UN call – Sustainability” and his name “David Alman”
So other entries by Subject Header might read thus:
UN call – Sustainability – Mary Saunders
UN call – Sustainability – Kent Myers
… and so on.
Hence each poster would have a ’summary’ blog page that includes the main theme and their own name as a subject header.
> 3. I will create the unique summary pages for all posters using the above scheme in the form of an initial ’stub’ – for example David’s above.
> 4. I leave it to each poster to go through their individual posts and provide whatever summary of their responses they would like to make.
> 5. Summaries can include HTML links (see David’s summary stub above) and a short sentence explaining the link. This needs a bit of editing and rewriting from your own posts.
> 6. In effect, this becomes a searchable repository of the thread with HTML links that can be continuously added to in future by individual posters who would have a simple subject header tag to refer to all their posts in summary
Please let me have you feedback after going through the samples put up above on the blog.
T.A. Balasubramanian • To get an overview of all the posts in response to Helene’s question, the main tag “Sustainability” works as a tie-in:
http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/?tag=sustainability
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Dawna, Mary, David
Thanks guys! Mary, give me some time and I’ll fish out your posts and links – going by the broad categories you have already set up.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
> Your summary can also go in the SystemsWiki Blog under your name.
UN call – Sustainability – Helene
Everyone gets their own personal blog page!
> For Links and Resources, maybe we can have another blog page called:
UN call – Sustainability – Links & Resources
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
This is a stub created for you. Let me know if the sub-heads work for you.
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UN call – Sustainability – Helene
http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/?p=297
The sub-heads are just some of the points I liked from your early posts – you can change them or continue adding more. You are a prolific blogger – I just read some of the articles in your blog – you look great with glasses, incidentally – and there’s a lot of food for thought there!
T.A. Balasubramanian • ST in action: Interview with Starbucks VP of Global Responsibility, Ben Packard
http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/04/interview-starbucks-vp-global-responsibility-ben-packard/
Q: One of consumers’ biggest concerns with Starbucks is the waste created from the millions of cups used by Starbucks patrons each year. The report states as a goal that the company will have a comprehensive recycling solution for paper and plastic by next year. If you could paint a picture for our readers of what that plan might look like and what obstacles stand in the company’s way of meeting this goal?
BP: When we set this goal in 2008 our ambitions, our expectations were really that we were probably going to have to change the material in the cup to be able to get it recycled. What we learned though, we took a new approach for us, which was to really engage through — I don’t know if you are familiar with Peter Senge and the work he is doing at MIT around sustainability and systems thinking, but we engaged Peter to help us bring together the entire value chain, the entire system of the paper cup. So everybody from the manufacturers of the liners that go on the paper to the cup manufacturers, to their competitors, to the people who sell us cups and their competitors, to other large users, our own competitors, and sort of all the way down the line — recycling industry, paper re-manufacturing, city and county officials that are responsible for establishing recycling targets and recycling goals for many influential cities and counties around the country.
We brought them all together and really mapped the system of the life cycle of the paper cup and realized that our greatest opportunity, the cup is recycled as it is currently constructed, and our greatest opportunity was to really connect parts of this system that weren’t really in touch. What I mean by that is our ability to get those cups recycled as a function of the recycling industry wanting to have that in the first place and understanding what the cups are made of, understanding what streams those cups can go into because there was an initial reaction for many years of ‘that must be a contaminant so do not put it in the paper recycling system.’ We’ve broken down those barriers through a number of pilots that we’ve done over the last couple of years.
We’ve even done a pilot where we’ve taken cups and recycled them into cups. So we are working closely with the recycling industry to address this from looking at the entire system because as you probably know, the systems are different from whatever is locally recyclable can vary from town to town and a lot of times it depends on the supporting and related industries in those areas. So we definitely think we are on track about identifying a solution. We have work to do though on the rollout of that solution and we are making some progress having just rolled out in the last year in Seattle and San Francisco, and we’ll be rolling out in Chicago next week with front-of-house recycling and there’s some really interesting things going on in that vein.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Thorbjoern
Daly’s musings are in refreshingly different language, yet they resonate with the ideas of natural capitalism. Great perspectives, thanks!
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The idea of steady-state economics is that growth really should be a temporary process to arrive at some level of sufficiency.
“What’s ignored is the economy’s digestive system: the input of low-entropy raw materials from the environment and the expulsion of high-entropy waste products back into the environment. A fundamental assumption of those who treat the economy like a totally circular exchange is that the environment is infinite relative to us, that natural resources and space to absorb our waste are not scarce. The assumption is no longer valid.”
James – Daly has an interesting quote on money and economic growth as a chimera that we are not conscious about:
Nobel Prize–winning chemist Frederick Soddy : “The problem in our economy is the one thing that economists have in their system which does not obey the laws of physics. And that is money. Money is the symbol of wealth, and yet it operates on laws which contradict the laws that wealth operates on. It’s very strange to have a symbol system that operates in ways that are fundamentally different from the thing being symbolized.”
And:
Finance is based heavily on things called “present value maximization models” — which means, essentially, that you’re discounting the future by a presumed rate of growth. You run an exponential growth equation backward to get a present value. So via the discount rate, growth is fundamentally built into finance. Well, that’s a very big assumption because the biosphere of which we’re a part is not growing.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • It’s also possible to get beyond money, as for example going the retro route to local barter systems – some of which may create their own economic islands.
There are many re-inventive barter systems being explored. As in this example from microfinance for the poor in Africa:
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http://microfinancehub.com/2011/01/20/microfinance-lending-cows-instead-of-money/
Microfinance – Lending Cows Instead of Money
“Microfinance need not be confined to lending and saving money, which not only presents safety risks, but is also subject to the impact of inflation. As a result, many microfinance institutions are experimenting with non-monetary loans, such as cows and seeds. This form of lending has its own risks – the cow could fall ill and die, or the seeds may not grow into plants as expected. However, the results have been positive so far.”
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I think the Internet is giving us a never-before-in-history chance to radically change the old mental models of money, economy and society.
Global networks and crowdsourcing could reduce dramatically the time needed per person to get involved in a social project. Imagine how could it be if people get together to create something as incredible as Linux or Wikipedia but having a social goal.
Or even a spontaneously evolving forum like this, were potentially world-changing Systems Thinking projects can be generated by people simply volunteering their thoughts and ideas freely!
T.A. Balasubramanian • Well, James, money isn’t what the old capitalist system wants it to be.
There’s an active new retro world of no-money opening up, it seems – helped by the Internet, to a large extent. Swapping is an increasingly prevalent form of the bartering system, which is more informal in nature than that of formal barter exchange organizations. These informal bartering systems allow people, usually through Internet communities, to trade items of comparable value on a trust basis.
Informal swapping generally does not require membership fees and traders are not matched by the site to other potential traders. Rather, they must find their own trading match through listings on the websites. Communities that participate in swapping include sites for swapping fashion, books, videos, games, music, and online trading for kids and teenagers. Interestingly, though, some of these sites have developed a form of “currency” that can be exchanged for goods on the site, such as “swapits.”
Not big enough to shake up the economy yet, perhaps, but it’s certainly being experimented with in many different formats. It’s not going away or replacing money for sure, but rather, complementing it.
In many countries, it’s simply a throwback to the historic period when the currency system was not yet established through the mediation of central reserve banks and mints.
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http://www.bartersys.com/index.asp
Get the Products and Services You Need Without Spending Any of Your “Hard-Earned” Cash.
Did you know that the age-old practice of barter continues to contribute to billions of dollars in commercial transactions each year? In today’s challenging economic environment, business owners are realizing that conserving their cash is a smart and necessary way to protect the future growth of their company.
Instead of purchasing the items you need or want with cash, joining an established barter trade exchange gives you the ability to make these purchases with trade dollars that have been earned by selling your company’s product or service specialty or excess inventory or production capacity to other active barter members.
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http://www.canadianbartersystem.com/
Welcome to our new web site. Our intent is to provide you with the facts so you can make an informed decision as to whether or not barter is for you.
The key to successful barter is every member enjoying new business while saving cash on purchases – a dollar saved is a dollar to the bottom line. Purchases made with credit cards, cheques, or cash all require money earned from previous sales. We offer an alternative. Members with the Canadian Barter System make their purchases with credit earned from new sales – sales that come through the exchange and that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Your cash cost is only the cost of your service or inventory, and this is how we increase your purchasing power.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Just went fishing around to see if there were estimates of the size of the parallel ‘barter economy’ – here’s something interesting -
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According to the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA), barter, worldwide, is a 64 billion-dollar industry – and growing.
There are virtually no limits to what you can do with a modern barter system. In North America alone, over 16 billion dollars of barter trade is conducted annually by an estimated 300,000 companies.
http://www.irta.com/modern-trade-a-barter.html
Last year IRTA Member Companies using the “Modern Trade and Barter” process, made it possible for over 400,000 companies World Wide to utilize their Excess Business Capacities and underperforming assets, to earn an estimated $12 Billion dollars in previously lost and wasted revenues.
In terms of income, Excess Business Capacity represents the difference between actual cash revenues received, and the cash revenues and profits that would be realized, if a business operated at 100% of its capacity. Most businesses are operating at less than 100% of their potential business capacity.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • David
Good perspectives there on sustainability alternatives!
One of the major transformations in the 21st Century is the huge explosion in the ’service economy’ that deals more with virtual services and the packaging and redistribution of intellectual ‘goods’ like software – and more recently, ‘cloud computing’ where you don’t even need to have your own data processing hardware investments to run a business.
Yochai Benkler’s presentation is already over five years old. Since that time new business models have erupted using open source economic principles. From Freemium, whereby 10% to 20% of the paying members provide the revenue that allows the other 80% to 90% to enjoy services for free, to small (for now) companies that enable users to create their own printed products and sell through established online retailers and others that “partner” with users to invent, manufacture and sell new products using a crowd sourced process where everyone involved get a little piece of the action.
And of course, we have sites like crisiscommons.org that literally change the world one project at a time using brains, materials and money sourced from everywhere. There is still so much more to come.
I believe there is so much enormous churn in the entire economic system that any one sustainability model would not match requirements everywhere.
We are living in interesting times!
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
I’m all for designing economic models – the closer they map the current reality, the better!
The reason I mention churn is that the speed of change in the Internet era is likely to create obsolescence of models far faster than in the past. The economy is shape shifting incredibly fast. Even the models that have been proposed in the first decade of the 21st Century are getting outdated sooner than anyone can imagine.
Take the example of the emerging definition of the “creative sector” and the “creative class” which is defined as independent from “the service sector” and the “service class” and the traditional “manufacturing sector”.
The creative sector of the US economy accounts for 30 percent of employment and nearly half of total wages and salaries — roughly equal to manufacturing and service sectors combined. This ‘class’ accounts for 47% of the total wealth generated – about $2 trillion.
This discussion – http://tinyurl.com/6or6sd – is based on the new classification of work suggested by Richard Florida’s path-breaking research into the constitution of the new economy – as described in his book, “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida
Florida, an academic whose field is regional economic development, explains the rise of a new social class that he labels the creative class. Members include scientists, engineers, architects, educators, writers, artists, and entertainers. He estimates that this group has 39 million members, constitutes more than 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, and profoundly influences work and lifestyle issues.
The Creative Class has two major sub-components
> Super-Creative Core
Computer and mathematical occupations
Architecture and engineering occupations
Life, physical, and social science occupations
Education, training, and library occupations
Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations
> Creative Professionals
Management occupations
Business and financial operations occupations
Legal occupations
Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations
High-end sales and sales management
There’s an estimate of the creative class around the world here:
Florida proposes three factors defining the ‘creative services economy’
* of economic development: Technology, Talent and Tolerance. Economists have typically emphasized the first two Ts, but to truly prosper in the creative age, all 3 Ts, and especially the third one, tolerance, are essential
> The first of the three is also the least controversial; economists have long argued that technology is the key to growth.
> Talent is the second variable. Leading economists, including Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas, have argued that growth is a consequence of human capital, a view shared by Harvard’s Edward Glaeser. I capture the role of talent by substituting a measure of creative occupations for the typical education-based measure of human capital, thus emphasizing what people actually do over past educational achievements.
> The third T, tolerance. Like technology, knowledge and human capital differ in a fundamental way from more traditional factors of production like land or raw materials; they are not stocks, but flows. People are are not forever wedded to one place; they can and do move around. The technology and talent that people therefore equally bring with them are mobile factors, and accordingly flow into and out of places.
Much of the focus in creative class research is on regional economic development, with a focus on the third T, tolerance.
In re-considering the new service system components by drilling down to the ‘real economy’, I think that there’s great value in the analysis that Richard Florida’s team has done.
T.A. Balasubramanian • There’s a UN-sponsored report on the creative economy as well:
http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/ditc20082cer_en.pdf
T.A. Balasubramanian • Stephen
A quick version of the Stansberry mega-size talk – sans the sales pitch:
Obama Printing Money To Jumpstart US Economy – Will It Help?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Kurt Richebacher on US Consumer Spending
Dr. Kurt Richebächer’s articles used to appear regularly in The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, the U.S. edition of Capital & Crisis and other respected financial publications. France’s Le Figaro magazine did a feature story on him as “the man who predicted the Asian crisis.”
This was about 6 years ago, but it makes a clear assessment of the fallacy.
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http://dailyreckoning.com/us-consumer-spending/
There is no longer any economic discussion. American economists are silent, deeply silent.Do you know why they are quiet? Because academic America, like all of America, believes that consumer spending is the key to prosperity. The high esteem of consumer spending is implanted in every American, including its academics.
There are many who say that deficit spending by the government is bad. But they don’t say that deficit spending by the consumer is equally bad, or worse. The American idea that everything good comes from consumer spending is preposterous. And that is the key fallacy in America today.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • I totally agree with you James. Beliefs and values – the mental models behind human drives – shape systems.
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
It might be a self-reinforcing loop – mental models shape systems, and the responses of the system reinforce mental models.
Americans spend, Asian markets prosper. Nobody wants to get off the gravy train.
The idea that everything good comes from consumer spending gets reinforced by the advertising-driven corporate marketing system – like James points out, it’s seen as good for business – and, as long as there’s money flow reinforced by the credit system – the loop goes on spiraling.
T.A. Balasubramanian • On Diagrams of Sustainable Capitalism
Reinventing Capitalism: Diagramming Living Capital Flows in a Green, Sustainable, and Responsible Economy
http://livingcapitalmetrics.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/reinventing-capitalism/
Some simple flow representations that show the comprehensively-defined four-capitals model – human, social, natural, and manufactured.
T.A. Balasubramanian • There’s a useful framework we could borrow from marketing.
If the proposed sustainability model is a ’solution’ – who would be the customer? The UN? Governments of different countries? NGOs? Businesses? Institutions? Environment agencies? All of these?
What are the customer segments the model would address? There are different parts of the planetary ecosystem with different needs and aspirations. Maybe each needs a different model.
I can think of three broad occupational segments (from Florida’s work) – manufacturing, services and creative. What are the other segmentation possibilities?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Dawna
I’m not sure that “corporations are accountable to no one” is entirely true – wouldn’t it make stakeholders like the capital and stock investors, employees, directors and customers irrelevant?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Some useful insights and visualizations that I came across.
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> Tracing the Sustainability Journey
From: Leading & Learning for Sustainability with Peter Senge
http://www.solonline.org/repository/download/willard.jpg?item_id=20741155
Here are seven concrete business benefits of working together to create a sustainable world.
There is significant money to be saved.
There is significant money to be made.
You can provide your customers with a competitive edge.
Sustainability is a point of differentiation.
You can shape the future of your industry.
You can become a preferred supplier.
You can change your image and brand.
New products, new processes and new business models are becoming integrated into core strategies in major companies. Nike has developed a system for rating all new products based on embedded water, energy, waste and toxicity, across their entire value chain – with a target of “zero waste, zero toxicity, completely closed loop production” by 2020.
GE reaped $17 billion in sales last year from its “eco-imagination” product line, and has a backlog of over $50 billion in orders. Coke, along with competing drink manufacturers, is working with WWF to promote integrated watershed management around the world.
Key competencies of sustainability business leaders:
> They excel at seeing systems. They recognize basic system phenomena everywhere – limits to success, shifting the burden to the intervener, accidental adversaries. In particular, they see the system independent of organizational boundaries.
> They collaborate across boundaries with ease. They know how to get the whole system in the room and respect the different interests and perspectives of all stakeholders, making it possible to build their social networks and realize breakthrough innovations.
> They move easily from problem solving to creating. Fear and anxiety can definitely motivate action, but rarely does it encourage our best contributions or sustained effort. These leaders are both pragmatic – they’re always prototyping and experimenting – one definition of creating. They are also oriented toward possibility, evoking inspiration and creativity throughout the system.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Some really valuable ST tools and sustainability insights here, a repository of almost ten years of work
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http://www.solonline.org/repository/
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Who are the perceived leaders today in the global corporate sustainability Oscar rankings? What are they doing right, and how are they doing it, year after year?
Here’s one list.
These are the trend-setters – by one yardstick. It’s possible that the methods and best practices they use will become the standards for guidance in the rest of the corporate world – the kind of competition thats actually good for the world.
“Social entrepreneurs are the only leaders effectively advancing the sustainability agenda”
To iterate Margaret Mead: “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.”
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Unilever Leads Sustainability Rankings
Unilever has topped rankings of the companies most committed to sustainability, in a poll carried out by consultants SustainAbility and researchers GlobeScan
The poll asked 559 qualified sustainability experts from business, government, non-profits and academia to name large companies that are “committed to sustainable development, seeing strategic advantage in pursuing policies and actions which go beyond the requirements of environmental and social legislation.”
Unilever was chosen by 15 percent of respondents, followed by General Electric (12 percent), flooring company Interface (12 percent), Walmart (11 percent) and U.K. retail chain Marks & Spencer (8 percent).
There was significant regional variation in the responses. In North America, Walmart led the pack with 21 percent, followed by General Electric at 18 percent. In Europe Unilever and Marks & Spencer were the top two. But in emerging markets, Brazilian cosmetics company Natura was top-ranked.
The survey also found that a majority of sustainability experts believe that social entrepreneurs are the only leaders effectively advancing the sustainability agenda. Asked to rank the performance of various types of leaders in pushing this agenda in the past year, 57 percent said social entrepreneurs did an excellent job, compared to 49 percent for non-profit leaders, 40 percent for scientists, 24 percent for corporate leaders, 23 percent for leaders of multi-lateral organizations, and only six percent for government leaders.
The percent ranking corporate efforts as “excellent” did however rise, from 20 percent in 2010 and 21 percent in 2009.
Asked the reasoning behind their choosing one organization or another as leaders in sustainable development, 37 percent chose “commitment to sustainability values”, followed by 21 percent for “sustainable products/services/supply chain” and 14 percent for “integration into core business model”.
The research found that many of the corporate sustainability leaders, including GE, Marks & Spencer, Natura and Walmart, had built their reputations incrementally, posting gains over most of the last six years. But Unilever catapulted into the lead this year, exemplifying what the researchers called a “what have you done for me lately” mentality.
Last November the company launched its Sustainability Living Plan, setting more than 50 social, economic and environmental targets, with ambitions to cut the environmental footprint of its products in half, sustainably source 100 percent of its agricultural raw materials, and help 1 billion people improve their health and well-being.
Last week Unilever Canada will become the single largest commercial purchaser of renewable power in that country, through a 59,000 MWh a year contract.
BP, on the other hand, was chosen by between 20 and 30 percent on respondents in 2004, 2005 and 2006. But its popularity plummeted in 2007 and continued sinking after that. This year – the first rankings since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill – BP received 0 percent.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • David H (with 2 Davids, there’s need for suffix tagging!)
Unilever has always chosen to go the ‘extra mile’ in fostering corporate values, so I’m not surprised at the response of the lady.
In India, the ‘Lever’ culture – it was called ‘Hindustan Lever’ earlier – is highly emulated by many other companies. Their management grooming process is deeply envied – there’s great competition to grab the top echelon of trained Lever talent. Many of them have been lured out of Levers to become management stars in different fields.
They also work more synergistically – with a virtuous business interest, of course – with the needs of each country they operate in. To take a small example, in India, Brooke Bond’s Sehatmand – a Unilever brand – (means ‘nutritive’ in Hindi), a tea with vitamins, was launched to address the nutrition needs of low-income consumers.
Nutritional deficiency is a long-standing problem among the poor in India. As the company states, “Three cups of Sehatmand tea provide 50% of the RDA of key B vitamins (B2, B6, B9 and B12).”
T.A. Balasubramanian • Talking of Saudis, the current outbreak of media bloopers over Osama-Obama takes reportage to a new level of confusion.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/barack-obama-osama-bin-laden-names-trip-reporters/story?id=13511989
Barack Obama, Osama Bin Laden Names Trip Up Reporters, Politicians
Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden can hardly be confused. But that hasn’t prevented a growing list of journalists and politicians from appearing to confuse the two — all because of a one-letter difference in their names.
“Obama shot and killed,” tweeted MSNBC reporter Norah O’Donnell late Sunday night before quickly correcting herself and deleting the post.
“President Obama is in fact dead,” said a local Washington, DC, Fox News anchor, Will Thomas, recapping Obama’s remarks from the East Room before being corrected by a colleague.
At the Fox News Network, host Geraldo Rivera did the same thing, declaring, “Obama is dead, I don’t care — ah — Osama bin Laden is dead, I don’t care how he died….”
In each case, it appears, the slip was unintentional and quickly corrected. But the latest rhetorical blunders offer a reminder of how the leader of the Free World and the world’s most wanted man have been wrongly conflated in the past — and how the media-saturated American culture can’t get enough of it.
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There was the embarrassing moment in 2008 when Associated Press reporter Dean Singleton directly asked then-candidate Obama whether he would seek a new strategy in Afghanistan with “Obama bin Laden still at large.”
“I think that was Osama bin Laden,” Obama curtly replied.
“If I did that, I’m so sorry,” Singleton quickly said.
“No, no, no,” Obama said, “that is part of the exercise I’ve been going through over the last 15 months, which is why it’s pretty impressive I’m still standing here.”
University of Chicago anthropology professor Michael Silverstein, who wrote an article on “presidential ethno-blooperology” in the journal Anthropology Quarterly earlier this year, calls them “delicious moments.”
“Whether or not it was an obvious blooper at the time, the gaffe is potentially turned into an index of something more deeply revelatory of personality, character, or identity,” he wrote.
“In our regime of ‘message’ politics, it comes either to count as a symptomatic bit of truth about its maker — emergent with negative value despite all precaution of deliberate staging — or to count as the positively valuated, deliberately delivered telling blow.”
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“Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq,” Romney continued after making the slip. His campaign spokesman later said the governor simply misspoke.
“It happens,” Obama said at a 2007 town hall meeting when asked about Romney’s comments. “Sometimes it may be an honest mistake, sometimes not. We don’t know.”
But lest you truly think the two men could be one in the same, Obama said, consider the physical differences first. “I have a lot of trouble growing a beard. I don’t have a lot of facial hair. That’s, I guess, a good place to start,” he said.
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Michael
Nice analysis.
‘Torrid dialogues’ are part of the drama on long LinkedIn sessions – rather like an ongoing performance of Hamlet, right down to the appearance of long-buried ghosts in the scenery.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Visionaries of Business Engaged in Sustainability Projects
Virgin’s Branson has always been ahead of the curve – his business instincts have almost always been good indicators of where the future is heading.
VIrgin Green Fund’s objectives maybe a more reasoned and profitable approach to clean tech investing in the long run. The selection process, however, is highly competitive and slow-going. So far Virgin has reviewed “3,700 companies and invested in 10.”
I think 3,700 companies in the green tech ball park itself is a great signal of where industry is looking.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/energy-environment/10virgin.html
In Backing Clean Energy Start-Ups, Fund Looks for Longer RésumésVirgin Green Fund, an investment firm backed by Richard Branson, is not going after the hottest new clean energy start-ups. Instead, it wants the ones facing a midlife crisis.
The firm, which is based in London and San Francisco, has been quietly investing $220 million in established companies that are trying to develop renewable energy or make the use of natural resources more efficient.Virgin is practicing a new kind of private equity investing to solve a particular problem of green tech start-ups, far past the early years when most tech companies attract venture capital. It wants to finance companies during the awkward later phase, when they need hand-holding, time and money.
“This is clean tech grown up — operating businesses with operating issues,” said Anup Jacob, a partner at Virgin Green Fund.During brighter days, on their way to becoming independent adult companies, clean tech start-ups could raise money through project finance loans or tax equity, when banks or corporations invest in green energy projects in order to reap the tax credits that green companies receive.
From 2007 to 2009, the total venture capital invested in clean technology companies dropped 15 percent, according to the National Venture Capital Association. But a parsing of those numbers shows that investment in late-stage companies actually increased 19 percent, to $821 million, while early-stage companies took the biggest hit, with dollars decreasing 41 percent, to $550 million.
Clean tech companies require more money over a longer period than the average Web start-up, so a lot of companies fall into this later-stage category. Virgin Green Fund, the brainchild of Mr. Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, has looked at 3,700 companies and invested in 10. Mr. Branson put about $100 million into the $220 million fund.
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The riskiest green tech bets have yet to pan out. The three-year annualized return for the Standard & Poor’s Global Alternative Energy Index, which includes venture-backed companies like First Solar, is negative 15 percent.
The most successful green tech start-ups will probably be acquired by bigger companies for smaller amounts of money than that raised in a successful public offering, said Michael Kanellos, editor in chief at Greentech Media, a research and publishing firm.
“Silicon Valley, in the green world, is mostly going to act as a farm team,” he said. “They’re going to find great ideas in the lab, but the really successful thing will be selling it to General Electric. There’s not going to be many independent companies becoming the next Google.”
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Branson’s $25 Million Earth Challenge
Global innovation contests have created some great business success stories – as Branson explains.
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http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/02220656/The-climate-change-challenge.html?h=B
The climate change challenge
Over the past few centuries, many governments have offered prizes to encourage people to tackle the most pressing technical problems of their time. My favourite example is the Longitude Prize—a £20,000 award established by the British government in 1714 to prompt scientists and navigators to look for a more accurate way for ships to determine their position east or west of a fixed point on the globe. More than 10 inventors received grants through the Longitude Prize over the next 50 years for their contributions to the solution; the main winner was John Harrison, inventor of the marine chronometer.
Today most of our challenges are so complicated that they require truly enormous investments of time, effort and capital. The Ansari Space X Prize, at $10 million the largest such award in history, was won in 2004 by Scaled Composites, led by engineer Burt Rutan, for building and launching SpaceShipOne — a craft capable of carrying passengers to 100km above earth’s surface twice within two weeks. The teams chasing the $10 million prize collectively spent more than $100 million.
Climate change has the potential to destroy ecosystems and impact the lives of billions. It is the responsibility of business to contribute solutions, since industry has been historically a part of the problem; and so in 2007, our group decided to launch the Virgin Earth Challenge to promote the invention of technologies that remove greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere. The winner must demonstrate a safe, scalable and commercially viable design to take man-made greenhouse gases directly out of the air at the rate of 1 billion tonnes per year. To put that figure in perspective, total carbon emissions from all human activity add up to about 8 billion tonnes per year.
We received more than 2,500 entries from all over the world, ranging from wildly optimistic concept papers to proposals from accredited scientists conducting tests on carbon storage technologies. None appear likely to reach commercial viability soon; there is a lot of work ahead if we are going to develop sustainable businesses in this field. Indeed, as one scientist told our Earth Challenge team, all the investments on carbon capture and storage research to date probably do not match the $25 million prize.
That said, with so many power stations, factories, cars, livestock, ships, aircraft and so forth—the list is long—pumping all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, the goal of taking 1 billion tonnes back out is ambitious, but not impossible. Our entire society needs to undergo a series of fundamental changes to cut carbon emissions from everyday life.
Our prize will only be effective if it is part of a wider system of support for development in this field that can get ideas from the eureka moment to fully functioning operations. We have made a large investment via the Virgin Green Fund to back pioneering companies working on biofuels, solar energy, and energy-saving technologies. We have also provided financial backing for the Carbon War Room, which is highlighting ways for businesses to get involved in the fight against greenhouse gases and encouraging investors to back green, clean technologies.
The upcoming transformation of our society presents one of the greatest business opportunities of the next 100 years. This will require patience as well as perseverance; to anticipate what’s next and plan for that situation, as well as taking advantage of what’s immediately before you. The prize we are offering and our efforts in this field are part of our strategy for this future. What’s yours?
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Redefining Growth
I was reviewing the posts that have been rolling on for the past few months, looking for a central theme in the sustainability dialogue that could weave all the sub-threads together, and it seems to me that it could be – simply stated – “redefining growth”.
Here’s why.
Economic growth based on ever increasing material use and discard is inconsistent with a finite world, and finite capacity to dissipate waste.
Yet, all business and financial models depend on growth: if a company fails to grow in revenues and profits, it is out of the game and others who embrace growth will take its place.
This dilemma may require rethinking how growth can be brought into harmony with the natural environment.
Is there a way to reformat “growth” in a different sense?
Is it possible to base healthy economies on continuing increase in value created rather than on continuing increase in material throughput?
So would it be possible to shift from the mantra of ’sustainable growth’ to one of ’sustainable value creation’?
What are the implications of such a shift, for business, financial markets, customers, and investors? Who is doing it already?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Vlad
Switch, switch, switch, switch, switch!
Ecological value. Humans as ‘just another species’. Bucky Fuller value.
The Cosmic Accounting System.
Energy is the real value of wealth, not money. The idea is how to share it fairly to make sure everyone has a share of the wealth, so people don’t have to work for a living or starve to death.
Universe life-support wealth accredited in the energy-time — metabolic — accounting system eternally governing regenerative Universe. Humans are designed to learn how to survive only through trial-and-error-won knowledge. Long-known errors are, however, no longer cosmically tolerated.
The 350 trillion cosmic dollars a day wasted by the 60 percent of no-wealth-producing human job-holders in the US alone, together with the $19 quadrillion a day wasted by the no-wealth-producing human job-holders in all other automobiles-to-work countries, also can no longer be cosmically tolerated.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Dawna
“It might help to remember that we are experimenting and exploring. It is not a time for agreement and definitely not a time to be absolutely right.”
You took the words off my mind, thank you!
T.A. Balasubramanian • The sea of endless questions.
I think we need to focus on one sub-topic at a time. Or risk drowning!
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
I haven’t had time lately to update the systems-blog. I’m hoping to free up some time next week-end. It would be great if people can make a summary of their best posts (with sub-heads) and post them on the systems-blog – either as comments or even here as simple text. I will take care of the links, tags and editing.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Dawna
You really know how to keep the suspense going … can I have a sneak preview?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Ekanath
I’ll have to look through the posts to find anything specific – does anyone have what EK is looking for?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary’s page
http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/?p=328
Just started. You have the longest list of posts, Mary! Will need several weeks to get your gems moved in.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Just added the following note to the SystemsWiki blog.
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http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/?p=341
SystemsWiki Blog – Capturing LinkedIn Discussion Key Ideas
Categories: Knowledge Management, Systems Thinking
The concept for capturing LinkedIn discussion key ideas by adding individual pages by poster from any LinkedIn discussion is on the following lines:
> 1. All key posters would have their own blog page – which they can edit themselves, or request someone willing to do it if they need help – as for example:
UN call – Sustainability – Mary
UN call – Sustainability – Thorbjoern
UN call – Sustainability – Helene
UN call – Sustainability – David Alman
> 2. The pages can be updated or edited by the individuals, have embedded links, visuals, graphs etc. which can be added later to make the information richer.
However, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to have so many people with access – I’m sure they would be responsible enough to use the wiki to add value – but if there is spamming, we may need to restrict the number of people to only those who are serious and responsible.
> 3 . There would be a common part in the subject line [here it is "UN call - Sustainability] that would tie the pages to the initial question a well as the intro:
UN call for revolutionary thinking and action to ensure an economic model for survival… How to make this happen?
New Category – UN Call – Sustainability
> 4. The tags would be useful in searching for particular linked subjects, or by names of the posters. The ‘categories’ can also be expanded over time, and have both ‘general’ and ’specific’ items – for example ‘Sustainability may be a general category (which other threads also might use later), but something like ‘UN Call – Sustainability’ could be very specific to a particular discussion.
> 5. The comments facility can be a useful post box for posters to keep all their updates and notes – on their own page – and others can also continue adding comments there
> 6. The blog would help collect the useful resources and ideas – and help filter out the ‘chatter’ in the LinkedIn thread, which, of course has its own charm, since people like to gossip and go off track anyway!
> 7. It can also build up – as needed – a related set of ‘Glossaries’ and “Useful Lists and References’ as part of the thread under a special page such as
UN call – Sustainability – Glossary & References
> 8. I’m hoping the learning from this might be useful to create a similar ‘group blog – wiki’ for other threads – as for example, Nick’s thread on population-climate which is closely related to the sustainability thread – but is far more diversified in the subjects being explored.
I think this gives much more focus and flexibility than LinkedIn provides. Perhaps LinkedIn itself might add some of these features later and make it unnecessary to have a wiki backend!
Your comments are welcome.
T.A. Balasubramanian • The WEF has designed an educative systems thinking model that identifies the components of ‘interconnected challenges, interdependent stakeholders and the speed of change.’
It starts with a big list of 37 ‘global risks’ in their barometer page.
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http://riskreport.weforum.org/#data-explorer-barometers
Air pollution
Asset price collapse
Biodiversity loss
Chronic diseases
Climate change
Corruption
Critical information infrastructure breakdown
Demographic challenges
Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions
Economic disparity
Extreme commodity price volatility
Extreme consumer price volatility
Extreme energy price volatility
Fiscal crises
Flooding
Food security
Fragile states
Geopolitical conflict
Global governance failures
Global imbalances and currency volatility
Illicit trade
Infectious diseases
Infrastructure fragility
Liquidity/credit crunch
Migration
Ocean governance
Online data and information security
Organized crime
Regulatory failures
Retrenchment from globalization
Slowing Chinese economy (<6%)
Space security
Storms and cyclones
Terrorism
Threats from new technologies
Water security
Weapons of mass destruction
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These are distributed under three heads – drivers that increase risk, reduce risk, and ambiguous (either increase or decrease)
[Click the 'Landscapes' tab in the visual graph]
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Thirdly, their relationships in a ’systems view’ that recognizes the complexity and the challenge of interpolating these risks – or even using them to spark innovation
[Click the 'Landscapes' tab in the visual graph]
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This is a great framework to visualize models of sustainable projects in a holistic way.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Data Explorer
The WEF model has a dynamic links page that connects the systems model sub-systems to very rich web pages for each individual topic:
http://riskreport.weforum.org/#data-explorer-links
Try browsing the links … the experience of seeing relationships is truly amazing!
T.A. Balasubramanian • Thorbjoern, David, Helene
Thanks for the ‘pause and reflect’ posts! In cricket matches, this is about the time when drinks are served on the field, and the commercials start airing.
I agree with all the assessments, and particularly with David’s summation:
“C” allows for an inclusive approach and welcomes a broad range of thoughts. So I don’t see it a default position, rather a workable one that might lead to “B” or “A”.
Given the WEF’s 37 major global risk mapping, I think there is a lot more to investigate in the sustainability domain than any of us could possibly envision from our individual perspectives.
The global is always harder to see than the local, but we do need to work with the local – while at the same time stay open to the global changes.
So continuing to mix and match several models and action plans and seeing where they are intersecting with global domains is a good way to continue learning.
I suspect that the Systemswiki Blog will be used more over time as a bulletin board so that some of the key learnings can be winnowed out and perhaps used to build richer models by others – as well as those in the present stream.
T.A. Balasubramanian • David
You mentioned CMM – are there any examples of CMM applied to studies of sustainability in organizations?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Will Allen’s ‘Learning for Sustainability’ Resource Site
Started in 1998, and built up since then, this Open Source site has a wealth of “practical resources for those who work with communities (in the wider sense of the term) to help them identify and adopt more sustainable practices.”
http://learningforsustainability.net/sitemap.php
I think it is a good role model of what the Systemswiki Blog can eventually become!
Worth a look if you are interested in designing and executing sustainability projects of any kind.
A look at the topics:
> Sustainable development
What it looks like
Sector trends and pathways forward
Community resilience
UN & other key global SD reports
Barriers to constructive change
Earth clock
Books on sustainable development challenges
> Adapting to change
Governance and good governance
Adaptation to climate change
Adaptive management – “learning by doing”
> Social learning
What it looks like
Strand 1: Systems thinking
Strand 2: Building networks
Strand 3: Encouraging dialogue
Strand 4: Knowledge management
Organisational learning
Participatory model building
Conceptual modelling
Capacity building, social capital and empowerment
Supporting innovation in organizations, sectors and regions
Books on social learning
> Evaluation and reflection
Emerging evaluation approaches
Framing 1: Questions and evaluation types
Framing 2: Theory of change and logic models
Framing 3: Scale and intensity
Different approaches, articles and case studies
Books on evaluation
> Toolkits for social learning
Supporting constructive change in multi-stakeholder situations
Complex or complicated systems
Guides for participation, engagement and social change
Checklists for social processes
Social marketing
Facilitation tools, techniques and tips
Scenarios for planning
Communicating for change
Manuals on supporting practice change from the HIV/AIDs sector
Protected Areas management toolkits
Public health management toolkits
Emergency and disaster management
> Research methods and approaches
Science for sustainability
Managing participation
Action research resources
Using narrative
Other social research methods
Trans- & Inter-disciplinary science
Ethics
> Using the Internet
The growing role of the Internet
Developing your own website
SEO tips
Developing social networks
How to facilitate virtual learning
On-line games for learning about sustainability
Electronic discussion and newsgroups
> Publications
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T.A. Balasubramanian • In my view, in the long term,the crux of this A to B converging to C is to have a social learning framework, that melds the key disciplines outlined in Will Allen’s site:
> Social learning
Systems thinking
Building networks
Encouraging dialogue
Knowledge management
Organisational learning
Participatory model building
Conceptual modelling
Capacity building, social capital and empowerment
Supporting innovation in organizations, sectors and regions
So while it would be interesting for the action-hungry commandos to formulate short-term projects like Kent has in mind – with empowered ‘exclusive’ teams – like Navy Seals on a rescue mission, the long-term objectives of the thread could be to learn through drilling down into some of the 9 streams outlined above – of which ‘Systems Thinking’ happens to be one!
T.A. Balasubramanian • I think what Mary is getting at is a fundamental disconnect between
> what the UN might consider to be a ‘worthy’ project [ The UN will make it pretty when the pilot projects are already heading to tipping points] and
> what would simply be useful for the ordinary citizen in the remote village – though unproven and simple and tested only in local applications – like the dry compost toilet
T.A. Balasubramanian • Thorbjoern
“Moving the work to the Systemswiki blog generates some uncertainty about where and how to make contributions (does it have to be more ‘finished’ to go there?)”
I would suggest that you take a call on whatever state you have your ideas in – if you aren’t sure that they are finished – hang them out to dry anyway – you can always go in later and make changes. That’s the best feature of a Wiki.
T.A. Balasubramanian • A versus B. Humdinger sanitation system versus low-brow composting solution.
Consistency and sophistication versus open imagination and ready to use – the two are neither at odds nor opposite ends of the spectrum.
Here are some thoughts from a design perspective.
Take for instance how a button works. If you were to look at a pushbutton on a device, could you tell its function by sight alone (all you can see is a button)? Probably not.
Now, if you play with the button and see what happens, and then asked you what its function is, do you think you could tell? Only if it behaves consistently.
Now, what if it is a really low-quality button, the contacts are very bouncy, the button has a lot of play in it and the device it is connected to is not de-bouncing the switch?
As long as the function is consistent (when pressed the light turns on and when released it turns off, or pressing toggles the light on and pressing when light is on toggles light to off) you would have no problem to “specify” the behavior or to use this switch (although you may have to practice patience).
Now, imagine the switch is very high quality and the device is sensing it very precisely, but there are hundreds of combinations of current status (button pressure, time-pressed, orientation of button) and previous state (time in state, pressure/time/orientation when entered or exited).
How long would it take to exhaust all possibilities and experience them frequently enough to “learn” all the behavioral nuances to be able to specify the switch “behavior”?
The answer is somewhere between now and eternity (or until you give up and go do something else).
Now try one more thought experiment: imagine you are creating a new home entertainment device, and the only switch and behavior you could make use of was a momentary pushbutton.
Why? Because that is what you used before and therefore will always use, exclusively.
Could you design a product with this constraint? Sure.
Would it be satisfying enough to sell well? Depends upon the device and use-case complexity, but likely this artificial constraint would hamper the design and therefore the customer satisfaction and in turn sales.
So which is the right way?
My suggestion is to always consider the user of the product – if a user is better served by an imaginative re-definition, then go for it. Build the cathedral.
If users are very comfortable with doing things a certain way, take great care in changing this behavior (and even greater care if improper use could be counter-productive). Let the muddy wall remain.
But in every case, provide consistency at least in the local sense of being understandable and repeatable.
Humans are very good at learning and training themselves to adapt to a poor design that always acts the same way. They have much less patience for an elegant design they cannot remember or understand how to use.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Helene
Great work on those summaries! I can imagine the effort you must have put in, and appreciate the detailing and categories.
A few suggestions.
> You might want to put some of the sections – like “Tools for Collaboration” on a separate page, as it is presently tucked away in Summary 3.
> There’s a lot of tagging to be done – that would help in locating particular pages or items buried in pages faster.
T.A. Balasubramanian • Thorbjoern
You had asked for the Wiki link. Here it is.
To get an overview of all the posts in response to Helene’s question, the main tag “Sustainability” works as a tie-in:
http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/?tag=sustainability
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T.A. Balasubramanian • Thorbjoern
Have moved your comment to your own page:
http://www.systemswiki.org/blog/?p=316
T.A. Balasubramanian • KK Aw
The IBIS format does seem a little more flexible than LinkedIn, especially with the links and cross-referencing features.
Would be fun to explore and compare with the SystemsWiki format.
Does it need passwords and ids for all contributors?
T.A. Balasubramanian • Mary
Don’t worry about messing up your posts and links – and don’t you dare go elsewhere!
I think your unique leitmotif – combining a smattering of stray thoughts with recurrent themes [permaculture, localization and so forth] is compelling and fun to read – far more than any other posts I have encountered.
T.A. Balasubramanian • There’s a neat line on IBIS in the CogNexus paper:
Questions, Ideas, Pros and Cons, connected with arrows. There, now you know IBIS!
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The power of IBIS to help create coherence and shared understanding is because it works with virtually any design or planning conversation. Just as Niels Bohr revolutionized the understanding of physical mater with his triad model of the atom (proton, neutron, electron), all statements can be understood as built up from the IBIS building blocks.
The great advantage of IBIS over other similar modeling notations is that any issue deliberation can be expressed in these elements. I have never run into an interaction that could not be expressed in Questions, Ideas, Pros, and Cons!
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That’s a strong incentive, Vlad. And note that both Pros and Cons are included. Does that meet the ‘confirmation bias’ acid test?
T.A. Balasubramanian • How Kraft Sells Sustainability (in a Biodiesel Peanut)
One of the ways in which corporate biggies are pushing the ‘reduce collateral damage’ agenda is by publicizing their sustainability commitment in dramatic ways – which also has the salutary effect of influencing other corporate biggies to do likewise.
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http://sustainablebusinessforum.com/marcgunther/51717/how-kraft-sells-sustainability
As vice president of global sustainability at Kraft Foods, Steve Yucknut has no problem selling the idea of eco-efficiency to executives at the $49 billion-a-year food giant. “If you use less energy, you save money,” he says. “If you make less waste, you save money.”
This is fine, as far as it goes. As Kraft reported just last week, between 2005 and 2010, the company has reduced its environmental footprint across its global operatio