Sustainability
People the Problem

Joshua Abramson ... 'We’re in denial that each and every one of us is the problem.'

Burgess COMMENTARY
I have argued for a long time that the 'purpose' of economic activity is to enable quality of life and standard of living, and the corporate form has proved to be an efficient way of organizing to this end. Within the corporate form the metrics that have made efficiency possible have been financial accounting and various types of financial analytics. What has been accomplished in the past couple of hundred years is pretty impressive, but new issues have emerged in the last fifty years which cannot be addressed with conventional money metrics. Simply optimizing the money economy is a train wreck waiting to happen ... rather we have to optimize for society and the environment and the implementing organization in all its complexity at one and the same time.

My sense is that an increasingly large part of leadership in the corporate space 'gets it' ... but they are constrained in many ways because the language of the capital markets ignores externalities and only has a focus on the company's money profit performance. An essential next step is to have measures about impact on society and impact on environment that are as rigorous as the measures we have for financial performance. It will happen!

Peter Burgess Peter Burgess YOU

I am broadly in agreement with this scenario, but see a couple of other themes in play that make it difficult to make the changes needed.

Firstly, I totally agree that we, as consumers, are a problem, and the future of the planet depends on consumers taking a very different attitude to consumption and waste than has been the norm in the last fifty years. But business and especially business decision makers need to understand the dynamics of business growth, the deployment of productivity initiatives, and so on. What is good for profit often has externalities that are bad for society and the environment.

The problem is that nobody is going to take much notice of externalities until we cost these as rigorously as we cost money expenditures. The good news is that there are an increasingly large number of initiatives to do this, and they are getting better all the time ... not good enough yet, but getting better. I also argue that government needs to be very careful not to constrain progress. Governments do this unintentionally all the time. This is a big subject, too big for here ... but it should be on the radar. Big subjects ... not in the mainstream yet!
Peter Burgess

'We’re in denial that each and every one of us is the problem.'

The Ten Plagues:
I am the problem. Me. Moi.

I published this post last February and it has been my least viewed. My analysis says that it's either a crappy post, or people aren't interested in the content. Or both.

At the time, I was raising awareness about the severity of the California Drought. The potential for devastation of the 8th largest economy in the world is just too big a context for most of us to wrap our minds around. Instead, we blog about the relative usefulness vs. uselessness of the Apple Watch.

Without being Henny Penny or Cassandra, we're hitting a key inflection point for the viability of our species: notice I don't say, 'for the planet'. We're just not that important. The dinosaurs ruled the planet for 135 million years, yet they, along with 75 percent of all existing life, became extinct in the blink of an eye.

Humans have been the 'dominant' species for around 10,000 years: our entire history will amount to an insignificant footnote in the history of Planet Earth.

By the year 2062, we'll hit nine billion people. That's assuming the continued slowing trend in our growth rate and that our exponential rise will flatten out. Consider that there were 3 billion people only fifty years ago.

If we don't stop in our tracks now, not ten years in the future, we'll hasten our extinction event. It's not just the raw numbers of us taking up space: it's the footprint we take up in resources and fouling up the planet with our messes: our hyrdrocarbons, our plastics, our poisons. Planet Earth doesn't care. She'll give rise to whatever mutative, adaptive species will find the environment habitable.

But I do care, for the sake of our children's generation. I don't want to hand over the keys of a rusted-out bucket of bolts and say 'good luck'. We can either create a different outcome, or hand them their Interstellar future. But remember, Interstellar is cli-fi and ends on a happy note. Reality most likely will come without the Hollywood Ending.

All it takes is mindfulness and responsibility for our actions.That's not asking much, is it? I love you.

Saw a great post today via Richard Branson: Towards zero carbon and beyond.

I commented that, 'it occurs as a chicken vs. egg conundrum. We are the problem, all of us. Until we curb our appetites, every man and woman, more 'heroic' efforts will only attenuate the symptoms.'

One of my biggest heroes is Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia. His book, Let my People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman is one of my bibles.

He is all about taking personal responsibility for the world around us. When I feel powerless about big corporations, big money in politics, forces that cannot be overcome, resulting in the hastening of our extinction, I can choose not to buy blueberries from Chile in February!

'The reason why we won’t face up to our problems with the environment is that we are the problem. It’s not the corporations out there, it’s not the governments, it’s us. We’re the ones telling the corporations to make more stuff, and make it as cheap and as disposable as possible. We’re not citizens anymore. We’re consumers. That’s what we’re called. It’s just like being an alcoholic and being in denial that you’re an alcoholic. We’re in denial that each and every one of us is the problem. And until we face up to that, nothing’s going to happen. So, there’s a movement for simplifying your life: purchase less stuff, own a few things that are very high quality that last a long time, and that are multifunctional.' --Yvon Chouinard.

Our family has taken on an austerity program the likes of which I've always yearned for. 75 percent less stuff, then a further 50 percent reduction of what remained, which is a net reduction of 87.5 percent. We don't miss anything we no longer have.

My current bibles are the works of The Minimalists and Essentialism: The Discipline Pursuit of Less

And if you think it's too much for you to make a difference, in the immortal words of Michael Keaton: Don't whine, don't complain, just keep going.

I Love You! @theiloveyouman