May 2012 — This fall of 2012, Jeffrey will teach “Sustaining Social Change in the New Economy: Opportunities and challenges for a just and equitable future” at New York University. The class is sponsored by, and was developed in conjunction with, the NYU Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship.

It will explore the unfolding landscape in which the increasing challenges generated by the unsustainable use of non-renewable resources collides with a new economy that will dramatically realign power and influence.

This course will focus on three central questions:

• How does our understanding of sustainability need to evolve to create a future of health and wellbeing, a future that is regenerative rather than destructive?
• What historic, legal, policy, political and dynamic factors contributed to the design of an economy so obsessively focused on short-term results that we have incentivized behavior that is dangerous and destructive for our long-term survival?
• How do we move towards a new economy driven by a sustainable understanding of wealth and happiness, equity and justice that insists on a systems based, long-term point of view? How do we build and manage organizations that personify this edict?

Jeffrey’s experience with sustainable business and the world of non-profit environmental organizations, as the Co-Chair of Greenpeace USA, shape his perspective. Combining his own experience with readings from other thought leaders and guest lecturers’, the course will cover the frameworks that are required to understand this unfolding reality from a systems perspective. The course will also explore where the practice of sustainability has hindered our ability to meet the challenges we face, what key aspects of the new economy will most likely shape the coming decades and how that economy will become increasingly dependent on a radically more advanced practice of sustainability.

Sustainability will be explored as a system that requires the integration of environmental considerations with the impact of other key influences from population and policy to social equity, business strategy, consumer behavior, education and culture.

Economics has dominated the way in which we practice sustainability. A system of taxes, regulations, laws, accounting codes and zoning rules have conspired to allow business and society to externalize the negative costs associated with growth and development. This absence of “full-cost-accounting” is at the core of an unsustainable economic system that ensures “bad” products and services cost less than “good” products and services, driving consumer behavior in the wrong direction. These incentives also encourage organizations and businesses to peruse strategies obsessed with their short-term impact and disregard the long term, often-unintended consequences of their behavior.

The goal of the course will be to ensure that students gain an understanding of how sustainability can drive strategy at any organization whether in the public or the private sector. A critical part of this exploration will include one of the most significant challenges our society faces, our understanding of wealth and happiness, what it is and how it is created. Alternative possibilities related to the creation of wealth and happiness is critical to the development of a sustainable future.

The class will lead to an understanding of sustainability that is grounded in clarity about how we can and must co-create a “new economy” that supports a just and equitable future.

Click here to view the class syllabus.