Week 10

Outline:

1. Triple Bottom Line (TBL)

• Background – what is the goal? What does it aim to achieve?
• Why do corporations use it?
• What are the strengths of the model?
• What are the limitations?
  • In practice, the TBL often appears to favour the economic dimension, with the social or ecological dimensions considered as an afterthought rather than being given equal weighting at the beginning.

• What are the underlying assumptions of the framework?
• TBL was developed by John Elkington in 1994 – at a time when the concept of “sustainability” was gaining increased attention.

2. Sustainability

• Varying definitions of “sustainability” – for example Al Bartlett states “what does it mean to be “socially sustainable” and “environmentally sustainable”. Is it possible to have one without the other?
• Political leaders and corporations have various measures which promote “sustainability” – Eg. “Sustainable growth” – however is this really possible when both seem to be at conflict with each other?
• Unfortunately, sustainability is often defined using economic and political assumptions.
• Can the TBL help to achieve sustainability?
  • for whom?
  • for how long?
  • at what level?

• The concept of sustainability has received widespread attention due to the increasing prevalence of global problems – according to Jackson there are two critical factors that limit our capability to live well: the increasing global population and the finite nature of resources

3. Population Growth, Depletion of Resources

• The world today is being challenged by many of the same issues that once destroyed ancient empires – the main difference is that the challenges we face today are global rather than region in scale.
• Diamond’s concepts – 5 point framework
• Current state (6B people):
  • The richest 20% of the world’s population 75% of the total global income while the poorest 20% have to live on only 1.5%.
  • (Get % of global population living in poverty)

• Future state (9B people):
  • Another 2.6B people are predicted by 2050. The proportion of the world’s people living in less developed countries will increase from 80% in 2000 to 88% in 2050.
  • We barely have the resources to support our current global population, what will the scenario look like with 9B people? How are we going to support 9B people?

• One of the serious consequences associated with population growth is the depletion of resources.
  • Water shortages, over-fishing, depletion of oil reserves etc.

4. Economic Model, Capitalism

• In a capitalist system, economic growth benefits the rich more than the poor:
  • The capitalist system has lead to structural inequality in which at the very top, there are thousands of billionaires who control many of the world’s largest corporations. At the very bottom there are tens of millions of labourers, child slaves etc.

• The Economic Model is driven by:
  • Exploitation of natural resources
  • Growth and innovation (novelty, creative destruction)
  • Consumption. (Consumption drives growth, growth and technological progress drives consumption).
  • Productivity – the global economic system has been designed to increase productivity and profits – not to redistribute wealth or protect the environment. (Also mass production).

• Annie Leonard: Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption & Disposal = “Materials Economy”
  • It is a linear system – however we cannot run a linear system on a finite planet. The industrial system we have today is linear: it is focused on making a product and getting it to a customer quickly and cheaply without considering much else.
  • A linear, one-way cradle-to-grave model. Resources are extracted, shaped into products, sold and eventually disposed of in a “grave” of some kind, usually a landfill or incinerator. Cradle-to-grave designs dominate modern manufacturing. Sometimes it is often cheaper to buy a new version of even the most expensive appliance than to have it repaired. Many products are designed with “built-in-obsolescence,” to last only for a certain period of time, to allow – and to encourage the customer to get rid of the item and buy a new model.

• Although the Industrial Revolution has undoubtedly produced significant scientific and technological advances which have enabled living standards to rise, Industrialisation has come at a cost – to the environment.
• The “mechanistic and materialistic” worldview of the Industrial system has produced a consumer society in which natural capital is converted into manufactured and financial capital without taking into account environmental or social costs.
• Industrial capitalism is unsustainable is because it is organised by a belief system that does not recognise the need for limits – limits on environmental exploitation, limits on economic competition and limits on social inequality. Industrial capitalism is like a car that has an accelerator but no brakes.

 

5. What needs to be done?

• Not a condemnation of the Triple Bottom Line – but critiquing and asking new questions.
• Tim Jackson suggests we need to re-think our economic model and our definition of “prosperity”.
• In order for a global economy to be sustainable, it must be able to accurately determine the real costs and benefits of human and biophysical activities.
  • This involves re-assessing the underlying assumptions of the Triple Bottom Line – perhaps corporations need to think of this framework as the “Triple Top Line” whereby concerns are addressed upfront rather than returning to them after the fact. – Often a project that begins with pronounced concerns of Ecology or Equity (How do I create habitat? How can I create jobs?) can turn out to be tremendously productive in ways that would never have been imagined if you’d started from a purely economic perspective. –McDonough & Braungart.
  • We also need to re-assess the assumption that the GDP is the ideal measure of economic activity. (The GDP essentially ignores the Social and Environmental dimensions of the Triple Bottom Line).

• We need to recognise that financial and ecological sustainability are intimately linked.
  • Instead of treating the environment as external to the economy as a place where we extract raw resources and dump waste – we will have to recognise that the economy is a subsystem of the environment. This involves changing our worldview: in reality the environment is not outside and separate from the economy; the economy is inside of and a part of the environment.

Week 7

Evolution’s Edge – Graeme Taylor:

• If global civilisation is to survive, it must evolve into a completely new type of societal system. A consumer society cannot be transformed into a conserver society without structural change. (What are these structural changes?)
• The corporations and governments that have fought the hardest against limiting atmospheric pollution are the ones with the most to lose from programs that encourage conserving energy and using alternative fules – eg. ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy etc.
• In the words of Achim Steiner, the chief of the United Nation’s Environment Program, “The missing link is universal political action”. Will the world’s leaders be prepared to put conservation above consumption?
• The cost of solving the problems will be much less than the cost of doing nothing.
• Sufficient resources exist to solve all the world’s major problems, but the global system has been designed to increase productivity and profits, not to redistribute wealth or protect the environment.
• The reason why industrial capitalism is unsustainable is because it is organised by a belief system that does not recognise the need for limits – limits on environmental exploitation, limits on economic competition and limits on social inequality. Industrial capitalism is like a car that has an accelerator but no brakes.

• The world system is designed to reward success, not morality. Whatever the values of their owners might be, companies must be able to successfully compete and make profits in order to survive, which means that any business that makes the welfare of its employees and the public more important than its bottom line risks commercial failure.
  
• Structural inequality – the world is composed of very unequal social structures (eg. At the very top there are thousands of billionaires who control many of the world’s largest corporations. At the very bottom there are tens of millions of labourers, child slaves etc.) The richest 20% of the world’s population enjoy 75% of the total global income while the poorest 20% have to live on only 1.5%.
  
• While technological advances will improve efficiencies and reduce waste, they will not change the societal values and structures that promote limitless consumption and growing inequality. Technological advances can postpone environmental collapse, but only social advances can transform an unsustainable consumer society into a sustainable conserver society.
• New technologies can allow us to utilise lower quality resources and to use resources more efficiently, but they cannot create new materials out of nothing. They can postpone the collapse of an ever-expanding economy, but they cannot prevent it. (Similar to Al Bartlett’s Titanic analogy)
• The consumer society is the product of the mechanistic and materialistic worldview of the industrial system, which believes that the universe is made up of discrete objects rather than inter-related systems. From this perspective, humans, animals, plants, mountains and rivers have no connection to each other and no intrinsic value – they only exist to be manipulated and used for personal gain. This worldview creates an economic system in which natural capital is converted into manufactured and financial capital without taking into account environmental or social costs.
• The obstacles to change are not technical, but social – the need to change the views, values and habits of governments, businesses and consumers.
• Instead of treating the environment as external to the economy and as a place where we extract raw resources and dump waste – we will have to recognise that the economy is a subsystem of the environment. This involves changing our worldview: in reality the environment is not outside and separate from the economy; the economy is inside of and a part of the environment

• Sustainability requires individual, corporate and governmental accountability and responsibility.
• Although societies are living systems with dynamics and structures that individuals do not have, because they are collections of individuals they exist to serve human needs. When we talk about societal change we are talking about changes in the views, values and behaviours of many individuals.

• The global movement for change has serious weaknesses – it is largely uncoordinated and still lacks the political and economic power to prevent the destruction of nature and civilisation. We need a clear, unifying vision of “sustainability”.

Week 6

• Current situation
  • Driven by popn growth, consumption, depletion of resources etc.
  • Role of organisations in contributing to these factors ie. corporations sending the wrong signals
    • Advertisements – creating “destructive illusions”
    • Govts also sending the wrong signals – also driven by corporations
    • (Eg. Tobacco Industry)
  • We don’t even have enough resources to support 6B people – how can we support 9B people?
    • Why 9B people?
• Can we change our current trajectory?
  • By using initiatives from organisations such as “green computing” and sustainability measures
  • Initiatives such as “Green cities” etc are oriented toward growth which is not sustainable – there is no such thing as “smart growth” (Al Bartlett)
  • However, are these initiatives really going to make a big impact?
    • No because they are not addressing the fundamental problems
    • These measures can be considered as “shifting the burden archetypes”
    • We are deluding ourselves as individuals and corporations into thinking that we are really making a change
    • However, although these measures may not bring absolute change, they do raise awareness
• What needs to be done?
  • Need to change our perceptions of prosperity and success? But how?
  • “A consumer society cannot be transformed into a conserver society without structural change” – Graeme Taylor – Evolution’s Edge.
    • What are these structural changes?

Week 5

Notes on Hans Rosling on population growth:

• Gap between West and developing countries
• Developing countries have turned into emerging economies – aspiring to live like richest nations
• Improving child survival to 90% in these developing countries will get world population growth to stop
• Health investments in developing countries are actually helping us to reach a “sustainable population size of the world”.
• “We can stop at 9 billion people if we do the right things – child survival is the new green.”
• Role of the old West in the new world is to become part of the foundation of the modern world.

Questions:

• Where do global population estimates come from?
  • What are the assumptions used to make these estimates (ie. changes in fertility and mortality rates in the next few decades)
• How valid are these global population estimates?
  • (It has been argued that some of today’s predictions of what the global population will be in 2050 are actually much lower than they were in the 60s and 70s. )
• World Bank estimates 1.4 billion people live less on a euro a day – What will 2 billion more people do to this situation?
• Why do we think/assume these population estimates are stable? And do we even wanna get there?
• Does the earth have a carrying capacity?
  • If so, what is it?
  • And when will we reach or overshoot this limit?
• What is the scenario going to look like with 9 billion people?
• How do we get the message out that population growth is a major problem?

Week 4

Notes on “Prosperity without Growth” by Tim Jackson:

• Prosperity: ability of human society to flourish within ecological limits
• Rich get richer, poor get poorer
• How – and for how long is continued growth possible without coming up against the ecological limits?
• Financial and ecological sustainability are intimately linked
• Two critical factors that limit our capability to live well:
  • finite nature of resources
  • the global population
    • the larger the global popn. the faster we hit the “ecological buffers”
• Consumption drives growth, growth and technological progress drives consumption.
• “Efficiency” can actually drive growth forwards. Efficiency brings down the cost of goods over time which has the counter-intuitive effect of stimulating demand and promoting growth.
• Technological efficiency is both an outcome from and a fundamental driver of economic growth
• Joseph Schumpeter – novelty and innovation are vital in driving economic growth
• Novelty is linked to the symbolic role that consumer goods play in our lives
• We need to identify opportunities for change within society – ie. changes in values, changes in lifestyles, changes in social structure – which will free us from the damaging social logic of consumerism
• There is little resilience within the current system – once the economy starts to falter, feedback mechanisms push the economy in the opposite direction toward recession
• A sustainable economy must be capable of resisting the external shocks
• Fixing the economy is only part of the problem. We need to address the social logic of consumerism.
• “Intentional communities”:
  • Findhorn community in northern Scotland
  • Plum Village
  • Downshifting Downunder
• Structures and values that dominate society affect people’s behaviour and their ability to “behave sustainably”
  • We need change in the social structure to help shift people’s values and behaviours. Structural changes of 2 kinds are needed at the core of any strategy to address the social logic of consumerism:
    • to dismantle or correct the incentives for unsustainable status competition
    • to establish new structures that enable people to flourish and participate fully in society in less materialistic ways
  • Need balance between “altruism” and “selfishness”. Where this balance is depends on social structure
    • ie. social structures that favour altruism and tradition, self-transcending behaviours are rewarded and selfish behaviour may even be penalised
  • Need changes in underlying social structure which require governments to act. However govts have systematically promoted materialistic individualism and encouraged the pursuit of consumer novelty because that’s what it takes to keep the economy afloat.
• Assymetry between people’s values and social world around them
• People find themselves at odds with their own social world. People are trying to live, quite literally, in opposition to the structures and values that dominate society.
  • ie. govts sending “wrong signals” to the public (pg 151)
  • even highly-motivated individuals experience conflict as they attempt to escape consumerism
• Changing the social logic of consumption cannot simply be relegated to the individual – we need to put in place changes in the social structure

Week 3

Corporations:

• What are they doing at the corporate level?
• Examples of corporate initiatives – eg. IBM
  • Are these initiatives right or wrong?
  • Some initiatives are oriented towards growth which is not sustainable (see Bartlett’s chapter)
• What are their goals? – measures of success, are they achieving them?

How do we get the message out that we are heading towards a systemic collapse?

Themes/concepts by Albert Bartlett (Reflections on Sustainability..):

•  varying definitions of the term ”sustainable”. Examples: political leaders and corporations have various initiatives which promote “sustainability”.
  • Eg. “Sustainable growth” – is this really possible when both seem to be at conflict with each other?
  • As Bartlett points out, what is meant by “socially sustainable” and “environmentally sustainable?” – is it possible to have one without the other?
• Population growth is the greatest problem we are facing.
  • What are the serious consequences associated with population growth?
• The concept of carring capacity is fundamental in discussing population growth.
  • Carrying capacity defined by (Giampietro et al. 1992) as “the limit to the number of humans the earth can support in the long term without damage to the environment.”
    • How do we measure the level of “damage” we are doing to the environment?
    • We do not know the failure points of the system. 
• Population growth occurs at the expense of the carrying capacity of the environment
  • (This relates to Diamond’s concepts – societies collapsed as a result of the conflict between the needs of humans and the needs of the environment)  
  • (This also relates to Garrett Hardin’s Three Laws of Human Ecology: First Law: We can never do merely one thing. This is due to the interconnectedness of systems!)
• There is no such thing as “smart growth”. Growth of any kind destroys the environment.
• “If humans fail to stop population growth, nature will stop these growths”
  • (This is demonstrated in Diamond. Collapse of societies were imposed by nature).

Notes on Tim Jackson’s Deakin Talk

• Growth is unsustainable
• The existing scale of economic activity is already in several key places beyond the safe “operating space”.
• We are already in a condition of ecological overshoot
• In the richer nations, there is little return between increase in incomes and human development outcomes, therefore why are we still chasing growth in the richest nations?
• We don’t know how to make economies work when they are not growing
• Growth = Jobs = Votes => Politicians favour growth
• Creative destruction – the continual throwing over of old processes in favour of new ones.
• Consumer society – we have an appetite for novelty. More than just fuctionality – we signal our status with material goods (Sociology of consumption).
  • This also relates to Annie’s concepts of Planned & Perceived Obsolescence. Consumption is driving the system
• Do economies really have to be like that?
• Can we make sense of prosperity that isn’t about rising incomes and material wealth?
• Prosperity should be about our ability to flourish as human beings within a finite planet.

Week 2

“We can predict with certainty that we will be surprised; we can and do anticipate an array of catastrophic events. Unfortunately we can also predict with certainty that when they come, we will be inadequately prepared.” Fukuyama 2007. (As cited in Valikangas pg 40.)

“The past half-century, a period of extraordinary economic growth has exposed the frailties of our biological environment as never before, in a globally interconnected way. By 2020, or perhaps sooner, it will be impossible to reverse the devastating effects of global warming. The past decades of population and economic growth have simply been too taxing for our planet’s powers of resilience.” (Valikangas pg 7).

• FOUR YEARS. GO
  • Collaborative action
  • Empowering individuals and organisations to set and reach goals that will cause a positive global tipping point.

 “Don’t try to come up with the right answers ; focus on coming up with good questions” – Bill Lazier, Stanford Professor.

• How do we shift the direction of humanity to create a more “environmentally sustainable” future?
• How do we avoid the problems outlined in Diamond’s book?
• How do we know (or be convinced) that we are heading towards a “systemic breakdown”?
  • “Conventional wisdom, however, is that you can’t expect humanity to wake up until it is shocked into action by some global catastrophe or massively painful systemic breakdown. But by the time that happens it will almost certainly be too late.” – 4YG.
• How do we get people to attend to the dynamics of their actions?

Week 1

• Resilience Thinking – Walker & Salt
  • new approach to managing resources
  • looking at problems from a unified socio-ecological framework
  • the implications of “growth, conservation, release and re-organisations” of highly adaptive systems.
• The Resilient Organisation – Valikangas
  • Praciticing resilience and building it into the organisational design
  • Strategic resilience – turning threats into opportunities before they have time to form
• Prosperity Without Growth – Tim Jackson
  • Evaluates how “human society can flourish – within the ecological limits of a finite planet”
• Other Resources:
  • Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard
    • Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption & Disposal = “Materials economy”.
    • Linear system. “We cannot run a linear system on a finite planet.”
    • System interacts with societies, cultures and environments and “bumps” into limits.
    • Consumption drives the system.
      • Planned Obsolescence & Perceived Obsolescence
• Other Keywords:
  • Sustainability
    • Sustainability of cultures
  • Resilience
  • Diversity
  • (how these apply in organisations/societies)