Creating a Game Plan for the Transition to a Sustainable US Economy
Over the last 20 years, we’ve had a lot of interesting weeks here at the company, but this week promises to be the most fascinating yet. Seventh Generation is hosting a landmark three-day summit of some of the country’s top sustainability experts in Burlington. Organized with the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, our purpose is to produce a detailed road map to move the U.S. economy to one that is ecologically sustainable, socially fair, and economically efficient.
The first day of the summit will be held in Burlington’s Main Street Landing Film House at 60 Lake Street on Tuesday, July 7th from 9:00am to 5:30pm and will be open to the public at no charge. This unique opening session will include time for audience feedback and discussion, and will feature a round-robin exchange in which voices and viewpoints from a wide variety of perspectives come together to begin to forge shared solutions.
Our discussion on Tuesday will focus on how to create a society that emphasizes quality of life rather than quantity of consumption; includes all external costs in the prices of its products and services; measures economic activity and social progress in a holistic way; offers full and fulfilling employment; provides a more equitable distribution of wealth and increased investments in social capital; rapidly reduces its greenhouse gas emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change; and conserves and enhances all forms of Earth’s “natural capital.” Summit participants will air their thoughts about the objectives and steps they believe are most crucial to the realization of these overarching goals.
On Wednesday and Thursday, summit participants will meet privately to further develop the specific strategies needed to achieve the transition to a sustainable US economy. The result will be a concrete action plan that provides a broad outline and details the steps needed.
When we’re done, the Game Plan will be published in Solutions, a new journal focused on finding real solutions to society’s pressing problems and creating a sustainable and desirable future. The Plan will also be distributed throughout the world via a number of other channels including this blog.
There’s much more to come, but in the meantime, if you’re in the Burlington area this week, I hope you’ll consider joining us and adding your voice to the conversation.
Participants in Creating a Game Plan for the Transition to a Sustainable US Economy include:
Gar Alperovitz, University of Maryland ; Jim Hartzfeld, Interface Carpets Bill Becker, Presidential Climate Action Project; Bob Corell, Heinz Center ; Robert Costanza, University of Vermont; Thomas Dietz, Michigan State University ; Lawrence Forcier, University of Vermont ; Richard Heinberg, Institute for Global Communications; Elliot Hoffman, CEO Just Deserts, now New Voice of Business; Jeffrey Hollender, Seventh Generation ; Jon Isham, Middlebury College ; Wes Jackson, The Land Institute ; Hunter Lovins, Natural Capital Solutions; Frances Moore-Lappé, Small Planet Institute ; David Orr, Oberlin College ; Will Raap, Gardener’s Supply; Larry Susskind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University
Our Game Plan Summit meeting of leading sustainability thinkers has begun. It’s absolutely remarkable to have all these extraordinary people in one place working together. The brain power in the room is palpable, and it’s a very hopeful thing to see it so focused on things that matter so much.
To open the summit, I spoke for a few minutes about the challenges ahead. Here’s what I said:
Seventh Generation has spent 21 years creating a model for the possibility that corporate responsibility represents. And we have built a successful model that represents this new possibility. We have taught and influenced thousands of other businesses. We have provided a business case that supports the argument that sustainable business can generate returns that far exceed the returns of the average company. And yet, sadly, the world is little better off. In fact, by most measures, things have consistently moved ever more quickly in the wrong direction.
I was giddy with hope back in November when Barack Obama won the election. I believed that we stood at the edge of the positive change that was so desperately needed. This was the time we had been waiting for. An opportunity that I believe arises only once in a generation.
Today, seven months later, I am more deeply concerned than ever. More cynical. Not hopeless, but I have lost the boundless excitement and the sense that the future I had hoped for was just around the corner. While we are moving in the right direction under our new leadership, making positive changes from climate change to credit card debt, by every measure our progress falls far short of what is needed. The progress we are making as a result of our new political leadership is incremental at a time when revolutionary change is needed.
Our political and economic structures and systems, governed by largely invisible powers, ever more dangerously concentrated, will not change direction willingly. We will have a little less of what is bad, we will be on a slightly more positive trajectory, but it seems abundantly clear that our financial system will not be forced to restructure in a meaningful way. Global climate change will bring devastation upon the planet that may be delayed by a generation, but will come nevertheless. We will not end up with a new educational system that delivers the talent required to lead us toward the world we want to leave to our children.
This is not a condemnation of the new administration, but a sad recognition that the current incremental and highly compartmentalized change that is so pleasing after eight years of a world led by Bush and Cheney is simply not adequate.
I have sadly concluded that both the new administration and the field of corporate responsibility will fall far short of generating the change required to create a sustainable future.
Today we truly face, as Francis Fukuyama said, “a systemic crisis, one in which an old order of political economy has been shown to be both unsustainable and immoral.” Many see evidence that a dangerous imbalance in the relationship between business and government grew gradually over the past thirty years. [1]
So what is to be done? How do we seize this moment in history to make the bold, lasting, and fundamental change that is essential to avoid the profoundly painful events that are certain to unfold if we don’t?
First, we must reframe the challenges we face, and approach them not from the compartmentalized perspective with which we tend to frame and separate all our many problems — from climate change and declining fresh water resources to the obsessive accumulation of stuff and the twin evils of poverty and hunger — but from a systemic perspective that attempts to identify the common root causes of all of these symptoms of an overarching disease. Here is what we need to focus on:
1. Shared Purpose vs. Siloed Interests: The economic crisis, the energy crisis, the water crisis, the food crisis, the security crisis, the leadership crisis, the healthcare crisis, the educational crisis, the climate crisis. You name it. The crisis conversation is happening all over the place. What’s interesting is that each of the aforementioned crises has its own discourse, its own NGO group (each working with a single-issue mindset), its own conferences, journals, websites, funding mechanisms, programs, and so forth. While all these single-issue groups of change-makers engage in well-intentioned work by mobilizing action for their respective crisis symptoms, there seem to be, by and large, two missing pieces: one, a discourse across these silos about how all of these issues are interconnected, and two, a discourse about the systemic root causes that continuously reproduce the whole cluster of crises mentioned above.
We must rapidly evolve from a world where millions of single-issue groups and organizations compete for resources and attention to a world that begins to unite them in the common pursuit of a better future for all. One cannot expect each group to let go of their individual concerns, but it is essential that we help them shift their perspective and begin to view the world though a different lens, a lens that allows us all to see that our only chance of lasting success is through a greater focus on what unites us, rather than what divides us.
We are squandering our passion and willingness to help. In my own world there are dozens of groups representing progressive business, yet they never speak with one voice, agree on priorities or pool their resources. To change this paradigm will require a major shift in consciousness.
Such a shift is not impossible to imagine. In some places, groups have already come together in common cause. The Green Group, for example, has united the environmental community on global climate change policy. Multi-stakeholder coalitions have made impressive progress on sustainable palm oil and coco. [2]
2. Money and Politics: One could argue that our political process remains primarily an extension of money and the power it confers into governmental affairs. Until we can separate money and politics, we will never have a political process that acts in the best interest of all stakeholders. Publicly financed elections are a first and essential step.
3. Full Cost Accounting: Our current system of pricing products and services ensures that society perpetually makes poor choices. Until we remove the ability to transfer the cost of externalities from business to society, we will never willingly make choices that are aligned with the best interest of future generations.
By mispricing both risks and consequences, we encourage corporate decisions that are at odds with the long-term interests of society.
The same holds true for the metrics that calculate our progress as a country. By adding the pros and cons together on the same side of the ledger (our Gross National Product) and not charging ourselves for the depletion, destruction or diminished value of natural resources, we confuse economic activity with progress.
4. Ownership and the Purpose of the Corporation Business is consistently cited as the most powerful influence on the planet. In the future it will become even more so. We must repurpose the corporation to benefit society and all stakeholders.
Today corporate owners are incentivized to single-mindedly pursue the short-term maximization of financial gains. Whether it is how we tax capital gains or pay CEOs, we have institutionalized incentives that value the exact wrong type of behavior. There is a total disconnection of purpose between money managers (Wall Street) and capital providers (pension funds and individual investors). Professional money managers manage money to maximize their economic interests at the expense of the interests of those that provide them with capital.
Employees create value in which they maintain no ownership, thus concentrating wealth in the hands of stockholders.
5. Shifting Values: This is an unprecedented moment in history. The disruption, uncertainty, and reordering of our economic life will lead to new worldviews, marked by an unfolding revolution in social values and behavior. Through greater consciousness of the potential perils and opportunity at our doorstep, we must insure that values shift toward creating real and lasting value for all rather than a world filled with an abundance of artifacts for the few, ensuring a dismal fate for us all. This shift in “consciousness” leading must ensure the understanding of the essential nature of five values:
- Quality vs. quantity: First and most importantly we must simply buy less stuff, but what we buy must be made to last, leaving the smallest possible footprint behind.
- Long term vs. short term: Driven by concern for our future generations as well as the quality of our own, we must ask, “What are the long-term implications of my every decision?” What are the unintended consequences that only a systems perspective will reveal?
- Community vs. individualism: What’s in it for us, not just what’s in it for me? What is best for the whole? Where are “my” interests aligned with “our” interests?
- Meaning vs. matter: Unable to take anything in life for granted we must decide what really matters and is worth holding on to. Only in meaning will we find lasting value.
- Responsibility required: As greed and selfishness jeopardize our future, we must accept nothing less than institutions that represent real responsibility. Transparency is required as only “you” can judge whether “I” have fulfilled my responsibility.
As President Barack Obama said in his inaugural address in January, “The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.”
[1]Defining Prosperity by Philip Auerswald & Zoltan J. Acs; The American Interest, May – June 2009 [2]The Blind Spot of Economic Thought: Seven Acupuncture Points for Shifting Capitalism 2.0 to 3.0 Paper prepared for presentation at: Roundtable On Transforming Capitalism MIT, June 8-9, 2009 by Otto Scharmer
It was truly an honor and a privilege to have so many amazing, bright, and dedicated people join us at Seventh Generation to spend the last three days working “to develop a detailed and pragmatic game plan for how to transition to a sustainable US economy and society.” The results of our conversation will take a little time to distill and disseminate and will be published in a special January 2010 issue of Solutions magazine, which our summit partner, the Gund Institute, is launching next month. Beyond the discussions, the most exciting outcome of the event for me is the work that will continue beyond the Summit to ensure that the many wonderful ideas we generated are put into action.
Here are just a few highlights of some of the conversation as reported, in part, by our local newspaper, the Burlington Free Press.
Kansan, agricultural visionary and Land Institute founder Wes Jackson raised questions about how to transition US agriculture from annual to perennial crops. Perennials use far less inputs (pesticides and fertilizer) and as a result require significantly less energy. They also prevent soil erosion, capture and store more CO2, and leave our soils in a vastly healthier state. Wes presented a 50 year plan to transition all U.S. farmland to a sustainable state.
Will Raap, founder of Burlington-based Gardener’s Supply Company, championed “third-path” societies — such as Vermont and Costa Rica — as templates for change. The Central American country’s decision to disband its military about 50 years ago, he said, helped lay the foundations for universal health care, education, and a broader definition of what served as a “commons.”
American military planners — while not forecasting a dissolution of the armed forces — are redefining some fundamental national interest goals, said David Orr, who teaches environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College and the University of Vermont. “They now see climate change as a national security issue; they see a dependence on fossil fuels as a national security issue.”
Larry Susskind, a professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, challenged everyone to use language more precisely, and to be cautious about framing our dialogue within structures that will only ensure more of the same failed thinking. Susskind also warned that simple majorities, even in ostensibly democratic nations, too easily sway policies in favor of corporations.
The real challenge, Susskind said, lies in building consensus among people with widely dissimilar views. “I’m a little worried that you agree with each other a little too much,” he told the roomful of Green advocates.
Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, author with Paul Hawken of Natural Capitalism,and now with Natural Capital Solutions, declared that both the environmental and sustainability movements have failed and that more urgent and radical measures are required. “How do we prepare for the crisis we know will come, the climate crisis is now, it’s here today.”
Her perspective was shared by Gar Alperovitz, from the University of Maryland. Gar was thrilled to be in the midst of a group that was willing to propose radically increasing short term capital gains rates, incentivizing cooperative ownership, and exploring “national economic planning” to ensure a more just and sustainable economy.
Richard Heinberg, from the Institute for Global Communications declared that, “Growth (population, resource consumption) can’t continue forever, we simply can’t produce enough energy. We’ve already hit peak oil, it was on 7/11/08 when oil hit $147 a barrel. To move toward a sustainable, resilience economy we must re-localize.”
Thomas Dietz, from Michigan State University noted that, “We face all the challenges of the 19th & 20th century (war, poverty, etc.) plus global climate change. In 1810 a member of the House of Representatives had 50,000 constituents to represent, today’s it’s 700,000. What does that do to our system of democracy? What kind of government will be required to face today’s challenges?