Defining Sustainability Jason Lord

This year, I chose the topic of sustainability.

I wanted to spend some time on this word because

we hear about it a lot these days.

Even our own mission statement as a movement

is that we are a “sustainability advocacy organization."

And if you jump online and you type in the word sustainability,

you're going to find many ideas on the subject,

on how to achieve a sustainable world:

thousands of groups, organizations,

everyone with their own idea and their calls-to-action. So,

there are a lot people wanting to move in a positive direction

towards a world that works, and that's healthy.

How we think about sustainability is shaped

by the frame of reference that we use.

Whether it's economic or environmental,

political or spiritual, whichever frame you align with

when thinking about a sustainable world

shapes your personal values and beliefs.

Ask yourself: What does a "sustainable world" mean to you?

Depending on what your personal values are,

the answer will likely look different.

For example,

what I find with the monetary value-set

is that it externalizes structural problems,

such as pollution, deforestation, homelessness, and unemployment.

And it rationalizes these problems as sourced from a person, place or thing.

Such as unemployment

because of “lazy” people,

theft and harm as an action by the corrupt,

or supply and demand imbalances of the market

as “other” than the market itself.

There is no conversation within the monetary framework

that examines itself as a root-cause generator of negative social outcomes.

And when talking about sustainability,

what we get inside of the monetary framework is that

“Everything is OK.”

I see this from the debris of abandoned political promises,

the constant promotion of consumption in our TV and news outlets,

and the glossing over of issues from world organizations.

An example of this kind of economic window-dressing that we get

from monetary-faithful institutions are reports such as this one.

This is one of the first hits from a general online search

for the world's most sustainable cities.

And the fact that this is a top hit comes as no surprise to me.

This report references the UN's definition of sustainability

as “Cities that work well for their citizens in the present

without causing problems for themselves

and for the rest of the world in the future.”

That's their definition of sustainability.

And they use a tagline of “planet, people and profit”

as the three pillars of their sustainability index.

Ranking 51 of the world's major cities for overall sustainability,

it places Frankfurt, Germany and London at the top of the list,

and it goes down: Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Seoul,

Hong Kong, Madrid, all the way down- I couldn't fit them all on here,

and at the bottom of this frame is Los Angeles at #28,

as the most sustainable city out of the 51 they surveyed.

Now while this report includes social measures

like crime rates and education levels,

it is largely based on economic measures such as per-capita GDP,

energy use, and the purchase of goods and services.

Now also along with The World Bank

(I'm sure people are familiar with the World Bank)

they rank each country's “regulatory regime”

in terms of the “ease of doing business” -

which is the biggest euphemism of this whole sustainable city index,

because that is a glossy way of saying that if you don't play ball

with global banking power, then your sustainability is downgraded.

Now I'm sure many good people believe publications like this

will help pave the way for the future.

But to imply in a color brochure that these cities

represent some level of sustainability is absurd.

As someone that lives in Los Angeles (I know most of you do),

it's one of the dirtiest, most traffic-congested

and socially stratified places that I've ever been.

And the American Lung association ranks Los Angeles as #5

in the US for most polluted air.

Now how does one “index” that

as some measure of being sustainable?

The reality that we need to face

is that there is very little that is sustainable

the way our current cities are designed,

or the monetary-driven social values that people have adopted.

Out here on the west coast,

at best, we are scrambling to implement forms

of resource-saving technology by passing laws,

voting for public bonds to cover costs,

but then end up bankrupting California in the process.

And all the while we're still draining water resources because of our drought,

we're burning a lot of coal for our power,

and we're dumping our pollution into the Pacific Ocean.

Yet we're on the world city index at #28 as “most sustainable.”

It doesn't make any sense.

To touch upon another major framework

moving society forward, is our political institutions.

And with the circus of US elections going on right now,

I won't spend much time here.

But both past and present

show how this most-prized aspect of our political process

has become nothing more than a reality TV show.

And to be completely honest,

I think we're all better off if we just get a little Rick-rolled this election.

Because as we all know he “will never let you down."

(I threw that in for you.)

Media portrayals aside,

there is a more telling symptom in the political establishment

as to how “unsustainable” current practices are for solving problems.

These are figures from last year's campaign donation records,

by lobbying firms and their corporate clients.

I don't know if you can read that,

but at the top, US Chamber of Commerce ... $85 million.

You've got Boeing on there, General Electric, you've got

lots of-… AT&T, Comcast, CVS.

And if you click through the top hit

it consists of think tanks, lawyer firms,

telecomm companies and such, all classified under

Chamber of Commerce.

Anyway, these are the

last year's campaign donations to lobby

the government and influence our elected officials.

The political power of this annual expenditure

to influence our government, and to allow the donors

a profit advantage for themselves

is one of the driving forces that erodes social health.

Or as Adam Smith stated in the Wealth of Nations:

“…but to narrow the competition must always be against [the market],

and can serve only to enable the dealers by raising their profits

above what they naturally would be,

to levy, for their own benefit, [is] an absurd tax

upon the rest of their fellow citizens.“

This is from, what people consider the father of our economic system.

Hopefully these examples give you

an idea of where I'm gonna go with all this.

There are numerous methods we could examine

to discuss their measure of sustainability,

but I want to turn the conversation

towards examples of what is sustainable,

because identifying a problem without talking about

the direction you can go in, leaves you nowhere.

A wonderful example of a sustainable system,

or more accurately, a collection of integrated systems, is our natural world.

If we understand sustainability

in terms of the endurance of natural processes,

then we look around our world every day

and we see evidence of these processes and their longevity.

And it is only by respecting our natural habitat

within our economic philosophies that we will transition

to a higher state of equilibrium with our home,

such as is expressed in

the Natural Law Resource Based model the Zeitgeist Movement talks about.

From an atom all the way out to super-massive black holes,

all of these systems are connected.

Just as our earth system is dependent on the solar system,

and we are dependent on the Earth.

And as you may have heard us say before, we are all connected

by this natural and technical reality.

So, using the example of our city systems,

what does sustainability look like in practice

if the goal is to have cities that work well for us in the present,

without causing problems for ourselves

and the rest of the world in the future?

What methods do you implement

if sustainability is the goal?

Well with that broadly stated,

the method to employ that we advocate

is the method of science.

When unadulterated by the need to gain some kind of market advantage

over a competitor, or simply for the sake of profit,

this method works as a feedback mechanism

for improving our understandings of the world around us

through testing ideas through observation,

and adjusting what we know based on the results of experiment.

What would be a core attribute

if our design strategy is sustainability? -

not the only attribute but a core attribute.

It would be Efficiency,

in the methods employed to meet human needs.

Food, energy, transport, production:

all such needs would have efficiency

as a core priority in their design.

And in a monetary system, this is generally too expensive.

What kind of approach could be used for organizing all of this?

Well it's known as a systems approach,

which is an interdisciplinary method of problem solving,

that focuses on how to design and manage complex systems,

because our systems are complex.

This approach concerns itself with both component parts -

could be individuals, communication, everything

that a system contains - and also with the whole system being studied.

Therefore, it's sometimes referred to as a holistic approach

because it considers the whole.

So what is the most sustainable city on earth that you can think of?

The commercial approach

to sustainability has produced results like Masdar City;

this is an artist's rendering.

This is a planned city project in the United Arab Emirates.

Its intention is to be a fully self-sufficient city system

in energy and resource use,

employing the best that money can buy,

in both technology and design.

I've been keeping an eye on this project since I heard about it in 2008.

Estimated to cost $22 billion,

the first phase of only 6 buildings was supposed to be completed in 2010.

To date, phase 1 has not been finished,

and the project has pushed its completion estimates to 2025.

This is an example of the problem

of trying to create sustainability inside a for-profit paradigm.

The cost is just too high.

Another approach, taking the independent route,

has been for people to engage in

what is known as intentional communities.

Especially in the '60s and '70s after the book

'Walden Two' gained in popularity,

these initiatives often share similar characteristics

such as being “Lo-Fi” (or lo-tech) in design,

they're very labor intensive for their members

and they're internally based generally on a labor-for-credit system.

Joining such communities is not always, but it's often driven by

the desire to escape problems of society.

And while I find that they do begin with good intentions,

they all suffer from the inevitability that

they are not immune from the problems of the world at large.

And I know some TZM advocates find such initiatives appealing,

and as a long-time volunteer and activist for the Movement

it's worth mentioning that this is not what we're about,

because what we are interested in is a root-cause understanding

of persistent problems, which points to the problems being systemic.

Therefore, the system of economy is what needs to be addressed

or our problems will simply worsen.

The transition consists of impacting social values through our activism efforts,

along with the fact that the economic model that we're talking about -

a Natural Law Resource Based model - is holistic and therefore it is global,

since the Earth is the largest order system in meeting human needs.