Deep Leadership

A major part of the Transition Centre mission is to foster the type of leadership (perhaps stewardship would be a better word) required to plan, develop, promote and manage a sustainable, transitional, society.  It is clear that sustainability will require a new leadership style, attitudes and skills not fully represented in current social and business models.  Our approach, as follows, is an evolutionary progression of management style.

Why a different model? 

Economist describe the economy as three sectors:

·      The first involves production of raw materials include agricultural, forestry and mining products

·      The second involves the transformation of raw materials into goods, that is, industry

·      The third involves services to consumers and business

Essentially, all three employs roughly the same management model today.  I think a better way of understanding this is a glance at the evolution of how we’ve managed society:

·      Before the era we call civilization, tribal and village elders managed the affairs of their people, rarely more than a few hundred.

·      With the rise of civilization, life became far more complex.  The foundation of the economy was agriculture. There were kings, warriors and priest – a literate class of scribes who kept records –a very different form of social leadership.

·      The industrial revolution, driven by science, technology, and globalization, produced a quantum jump in social complexity.  This is an era of the expert.

·      The fourth era has been defined as post-industrial and is composed largely of services.  This sector began to appear as manufacturing went off shore starting some 30 -40 years ago.  It has also been called the information, or digital, era, dominated by the internet, mobile personal devices, social media.

The proposed fifth era is one defined by the impact of human society on a planetary scale with soaring population and economic development which includes not only pollution but climate change, resource scarcity, global economic instability and, largely as a consequence of these factors, growing political instability and global terrorism.  It represents an even more complex, and we could say chaotic, level of existence.  Leadership is widely perceived as failing and confidence in institutions is rapidly declining.

The US has become a predominantly services sector economy and our business schools are producing graduates who manage this information rich model that represents a marginal evolution from the industrial management style.  It does represent a new organizational style – largely, but still only partially, moving away from tightly structured hierarch and authoritarianism towards virtual team-building.  This model is defined by digital technology.  The market is global in scale.  This new economy is defined by increasing competition for non-renewable resources including, according to industry surveys, land, water, energy and other mineral resources.  During the last decade or so it has become clear that the current economy is not sustainable.  With a business-as-usual approach, it is only a matter of time before we start to run out of things needed to maintain a high-energy, material rich, society.

Integral Learning and Leadership

A sustainable economy requires a different type of worldview, another progressive step in management style, and a further evolved set of knowledge, skills and attitudes.  We might have labeled the new model of management “fifth sector leadership but have preferred “Deep Leadership” for reasons developed below.  In brief, however, the distinction between the management style of the past two centuries and the future turns around the idea of specialization.  The industrial and post-industrial eras mandate narrow specialization.  Deep leadership demands a broad and comprehensive understanding and competence.  It requires an integral approach to learning and action.  It requires the ability to see the big picture, the whole picture.  It is a systems/ecology approach.

Deep leadership has its roots in the tradition of the sustainability movement.  It draws inspiration from deep ecology.  It is, in fact, ecological management; and that includes both the natural world and society.  Mostly forgotten in this future-driven, twenty-first century, are the names of people who defined the environmental/sustainability movement:  R. Buckminster, for example, (died 1983) was an iconic image of this style and largely, through his writing and speaking, defined the model.  Bucky and Steward Brand worked together to create The Whole Earth Catalog concept with its vivid image of the Earth hovering in space (Bucky’s “Spaceship Earth.”)  Bucky was an iconic holistic, general systems, thinker. 

General systems thinking was developed at the peak of Bucky’s career and provided the foundation for ecosystems science (Link …).  Peter Senge, Harvard/MIT professor and author of The Fifth Discipline, developed general systems as a tool for organizational development.  He focused on sustainability in The Necessary Revolution. 

General systems itself was inspired by general semantics founder Alfred Korzybski (Link   ).  Ralph Borsodi (Link…), founder of the School of Living, also offered a comprehensive learning program in The Education of the Whole Man and subsequent writing.  Korzybski and Borsodi are two major, but largely forgotten, pillars of Deep Leadership.

The roots of comprehensive thinking go back at least to Emerson and Thoreau.  They understood the need for a holistic understanding of the world at the dawn of the industrial era.  These roots are expressed in the work of leaders in the environment/sustainability movement from John Muir and John Ruskin to Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, John Burroughs, Rachel Carson, Arne Naess, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Thomas Berry, Fritjof Capra, Hazel Henderson, E. F. Schumacher, Barbara Marx Hubbard, George Leonard, Paul Hawken, Theodore Roszak, Vandana Shiva, James Hanson, James Lovelock, Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins, David Holmgren’s and Bill Mollison’s permaculture and others.  This tradition is long, deep and incredibly rich.

Deep leadership is not only about a profound understand of life and human society but a capacity to translate it into vision, mission and programs to stem the tide of environmental degradation, to adapt to the inevitable consequences of economic “progress,” and to facilitate a transformative society.  They help guide us through this challenging era into a more secure and stable future.  Deep Leadership, I should note, is not about reform but rather innovation.  Time is lost in trying to fix a broken system.  It involves a long-term, strategic vision and the promotion of a transitional model to get us to not only live within the carrying capacity of the planet but to realize the dignity and destiny of the human condition.

Deep Leadership embraces absolute clarity about:

·      Conditions and consequences

·      Alternative courses of action

·      Capacity to motivate others under prolonged stress/crisis conditions

·      Ability to creatively and adaptively organize

THREE PROPOSITIONS

I find a cluster of three concepts that seem to define the conditions of the world today which Deep Leadership must of necessity address:  Change, knowledge and purposeful agency:

Change is a manifestation of energy driven by human activity, which has the capacity to use and shape physical matter and energy and social organization.  It has two aspects, passive and active.

Passive:  Vast, unimaginable, complex.  Explosive.  Disequilibrium.  The rate of change we are experiencing is defined by the J, or hockey stick, curve.

Active:  Change creates the energy for transformation.  It embraces the emergence paradigm—the active force:  In chaotic systems we find the emergence of ordered sub-systems.  We need to learn how to harness these energy systems.

Knowledge:  We have a vast accumulation of human experience and its role in human advancement.  This resource will need to be organized and accessible.  The Cove Institute[1] developed two concepts for knowledge and learning management:

Psynergetics[2]:  Universal Learning System.  This level of technology has recently been realized in tablet computers.

Polymath[3]:  Universal Digital Library.  Comprehensive.  Accessible.  Peer Validated.  Open Source.  This concept has been under development for decades but is still very much a work in progress (Link …).

Purposeful:  Entails a strategic vision for finding and realizing new possibilities for the human race.  Change is focused through agents who have the training and instinctive capacity to understand it and to shape the conceptual and organizational frameworks for adaptation.

Deep Leadership Curriculum

What does a twenty-first century agent of change have to know?  At the top of the list is a general/eco-systems framework of understand nature and human society.  Human communities are ecosystems.  Deep leaders will have to be not only holistic systems thinkers but multi-disciplinary: ecologist, sustainability systems architects, and trained in the planning, management, communication; with interpersonal skills that will allow them to guide the formation of restorative communities and economies; and shape interdependent and collaborative models of social organizations.  It requires critical intelligence.  It requires an ability to perceive the entire local ecology as a dynamic pattern of forces, to anticipate consequences and to devise effective, innovated, alternatives.

A generalist education may be defined as liberal but it is also wide-ranging, comprehensive and systematic.  It involves not a “higher” consciousness but a “broader” consciousness.  It includes a record of the human experience – an integral history, the natural and life sciences, including mathematics and the scientific method, and social sciences, world literature, the great religious traditions, philosophy, a practical economics, politics.  It includes arts and crafts:  the Deep Leader must be a maker handy with tools, able to render concepts artistically (and graphically).  It requires skillfulness in expression, in written and verbal communications, in storytelling.  It requires competence in economics and business entrepreneurship.  We live in a digital age and competence with this medium is an asset. Since we live in a world in which conflict is an unfortunate reality, military service would be an asset.

On a personal level, the home and family being fundamental to strong communities, a Deep Leader will arguably need to be a model spouse, parent and householder.  A working knowledge of healthful living is essential.

More than knowledge is required.  It demands skills and appropriate attitudes.  The attitude must be realistic rather than romantically idealistic:  Life is what it is and must be lived according to its own rules.  It requires a passion for a perpetually sustainable future, cultural adaptability and related things.  Deep Leadership involves a commitment to the future of the human species.  Compassion and empathy are mandated. 

Deep leadership embraces the spiritual as well as physical nature of life and living.  An enlightened martial art, such as Aikido, is indispensable as it develops not only physical confidence but a more integrated personality and robust health. 

What does the Deep Leader Do? 

A Deep Leader will of necessity be a skillful organizer, planner and manager.  Community development is at the core of Deep Leadership.  Education is the foundation of action and community.

One important function of Deep Leadership is eco- and social entrepreneurship.  Sustainable, or regenerative, economic redevelopment is mandatory.  We must pay our own way and that means producing goods and services that are intrinsically valuable; in which people will readily invest in, adopt and apply.  Prosperity, defined in sustainable terms, is integrally linked with quality of life.  Social entrepreneurship starts with the identification of the most pressing social-economic problems, problems others have missed or where they have failed to resolve them.  Money is lacking.  These may be “Mission Impossible” scenarios[4].  Deep Leaders must be able to develop radically innovative solutions; revolutionary and life changing adaptation of the system.

Deep leaders may be in the nonprofit or business sector.  The Benefit Corporation provides a viable alternative to profit-driven commercialism.

Some of the pressing issues we face today include:

·      Climate Change:  Adaptation to consequences of rapidly changing climate and extreme weather

·      Economic impact of resource depletion (Water, land, mineral resources)

·      Inevitable increasing cost of energy

·      Mediation of social justice issues arising from climate-driven economic instability

·      Employment:  Job security and equitable quality of life for all people.

·      Skill development (education, training, apprenticeship and mentoring)

·      Community (Governance, social order, collaboration and mutual support)

·      Chronic weakness of World and US economy. 

·      Too few transformational organizations and leaders

What is Leadership

The quality of leadership is found in all social species.  In insects, it is a role served by the queen.  In primates, by the alpha individual.  In humans, there is more to it:  Only we are conscious of the role of leadership.  Only we have language, curiosity, foresight.

Renowned biologist E. O. Wilson has put the human species in a very exceptional category of social species he calls “eusocial.”  There are only nineteen such species, out of millions alive today, and we are the only higher form of life in that category.  That we are conscious, language using, beings gives a distinctive quality to our capacity for cooperation and collaboration.

Before the modern age leadership resided in the strongest and tended to be an inherited privilege of an established aristocracy.  Kings often lead their troops into battle.  There were also religious leaders, including the great prophet founders of modern religions.  Christianity, Hindu, Buddhism, the Hebrews, Islam and other faith systems gave the world many of its great, enlightened, leaders.  There have also been social (secular) philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Confucius and Lao Tzu.

The modern, industrial, era redefined leadership in an important way.  Lincoln, Victoria and Bismarck, for example, inherited the terrible power of industrial commerce and war.  England, Germany and France schooled its aristocracy to command this new age.  In the United States, which rejected inherited aristocracy, something of a new order emerged, one founded on Darwinist principles.  Power became identified not only with factories and cities but armies and navies.

The current American industrial order was largely shaped by World War II.  Out of this conflict, and the Roosevelt administration that had already centralized the government during the Great Depression, came a “command and control” mentality that mobilized the world’s greatest economy.  Two decades after the war, the command and control mentality, called Theory X by management guru Douglas McGregor, was challenged by Theory Y, a much more liberal, democratic, structure of management.  Globalization also mandated lean, “flat,” organizations with less overhead and more focus on teamwork, on productivity, and upon innovation in an increasingly competitive world.  It is not coincidental that digital technology emerged at this time.  This is also the time American manufacturing begin to move offshore and the service economy became dominate.  The assembly line mentality became passé. 

In the US, a “post-industrial” ideology emerged.  The factories moved to the innately authoritarian and hierarchical societies of Asia, particularly China.  In the US, the economy became focused on the digital industry (Microsoft and Apple, for example).  It also coalesced around the finance industry – from which 40% of the country’s corporate profits are derived.  The culture of these new “industries” was predominately team oriented.  These teams could be dispersed around the world.  This is the world inherited by the Millennials. 

The oil crisis of the 1970s was a wakeup call.  It became increasingly apparent that the US was highly depended on the global economy.  It was a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina, in 2005, that nudged us to an awareness of the reality of resource sacristy.  While the storm damaged only a small fraction of the world’s petroleum capacity, the cost of a barrel of oil soared.  Political instability in oil-rich regimes became a major influence on the world economy.  In short, we became increasingly aware of resource scarcity.  An elite sector of the Fortune 500 became awoke to this reality, in essence a supply chain issue.  On their list of critical resources are not only energy reserves but land, water and other resources such as the critical rare earth elements upon which both the digital and renewable energy industries depend.

Since the mid-1980s we have become increasingly sensitive to the problem of a sustainable economy and global society.  The Great Recession of 2008 was a shock.  World population continues to increase dramatically.  Developing countries demand more natural resources and drive rising per capita consumption.  The humanitarian ideal of sustainable development proposes to lift all people out of poverty, disease and ignorance.  But it is also a powerful feedback loop that steadily accelerates the stress of the planetary biosphere.

Conclusion

Albert Einstein famously said that we can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them.  Our time is one of unparalleled complexity and the first requirement of a Deep Leader is a mind trained to embrace this complexity, to see it as a whole, as a dynamic, ecological process; to be able to visualize consequence, to imagine solutions and to plan and act in such a manner as to resolve these problems while there is still time.

Copyright © 2017, Bill Sharp, Transition Centre

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[1] Modeled in collaboration with now four lamentably deceased mentors.

[2] A learning appliance (tablet) programmed for access to Polymath database and to facilitate digital augmentation of learning.

[3] Sharp, “Plus Ultra” (2004).  This model has at its genesis Vaneaver Bush,, “As We May Think” (1945), General Systems Theory, the evolution of digital libraries, J. C. R. Licklider’s Libraries of the Future, the evolution of information technology, Jesse Shera’s and Norman Meise’s work leading to the automated card catalog, Oliver Reiser’s The Integration of Human Knowledge, R. Buckminister Fuller’s Synergetics, Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics and a variety of works on cognitive learning styles and multiple intelligence modalities.

[4] These may be addressed through the Vision 10 – 10 framework.

Community

The most pressing crisis facing our society is not energy or economy or even environment but the loss of community.  We have lost our sense of human association, indeed of our very humanity.  For the first time in human history the very experience of community has been lost for most.  We have not only lost it, we have forgotten it.  It will have to be rediscovered.  The underlying mission of Transition Centre is to promote the founding of new and self-sufficient communities. 

When I talk to people considered local leaders about community they talk back to me in terms of politics, economics and architecture.  Some speak of education.  What about people, I ask?  Really difficult question, they reply politely.  It is, of course, relatively easy to deal with the abstract ideal of community, about cities, urban development, mega-church congregations, even a “community of nations.” 

The soul of American civilization took root in small communities.  Small towns and ethnic urban neighborhoods continued to serve as the wellspring of American society well into the twentieth century.  Gone today, however, is “E pluribus Unum,” which translates as “out of many, one.”

The loss of community has been an inevitable consequence of the progress of industrial civilization.  The reality is that we have lost touch with the very experience of community, with the feeling, the emotional energy, of authentic human contact.  The simple fact is that our lives are no longer defined by primary human association, by the sense of deep, loving, compassionate, caring and sharing level of association.  But it is not all dark.  A lot of neighborhoods and a lot of faith communities are struggling to preserve their sense of community and their humanity.  These are the points of light.  But does it mean, if there are only points of light in the sky, that the sun has set on the full day of a healthy and vital human society that we all crave?

What is Community?

The word community is derived from the Latin “communis,” which means "common, public, shared by all or many". Communis comes from a combination of the Latin prefix “con,” which means "together" and “munis,” which has to do with performing services.  Roman life centered on duty, on service to the community.  Community is defined as: “A group of people having and serving each others common interests and goals.” These goals may include political, artistic, cultural, religious, national, ethnic or traditional interests.  Community begins in all cases with a common purpose, a common set of values.  Community, in fact, extends only to the limits of those commonly shared values. 

Over the past century the literature on community has focused on what was being lost.  One of the first to write definitively about the changes in community was German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936).  He formulated two models of society, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

Gemeinschaft, translated into English as “community,” describes an association in which individuals are oriented to each other in a way that is greater than their own self interest.  They share common customs and a common belief system.  These values and beliefs define appropriate behavior within the community which Tönnies called the "unity of will."  They have moderate divisions of labor.  They are defined by strong personal relationship.  They are distinguished by a strong sense of loyalty to the group.  They have relatively simple social institutions.  They require little formal social control to maintain behaviorally norms.  The orientation is emotional.

Gesellschaft, translated as “society,” describes collectives dominated by individual self interest and lack of shared values.  Gesellschaft is characterized by extremes in the division of labor.  Gesellschaft is “business.” In a business, workers, managers, and owners typically share very little in the way of values or beliefs, work not for the sake of craftsmanship but in exchange for wages, and lack a personal loyalty to the company they work for.  So too the larger society.  Relationships are formal rather than familial or kinship.  Social cohesion derives from management of the complex enterprise.  Social order is maintained by laws, rules, regulations and contracts.  The orientation is rational.

American community sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) said:  “The ideal society must be an organic whole, capable of being conceived directly, and requiring to be so conceived if it is to lay hold upon our imaginations.” He added:  "Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the process.''

Cooley developed the idea of the “primary group” which he defined in these terms:  “I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation.  They are primary in several senses but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of individuals.  The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group.  Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a ‘we’.''  Like Tönnies, Cooley found the most important forms of the primary groups in the family, the play group of children, and the neighborhood.  The primary group values the person. It is founded on an exchange of services.  It emphasizes human warmth and sympathy in contrasted to the formal coldness, impersonality, and emotional isolation of utilitarian groups.  He saw the mechanistic formalism of modern society as a source of social disorganization rather than progress. 

Redefining Community?

Traditionally, community is something that comes out of people living and working closely together.  Originally it was life in a village, later towns and urban neighborhoods.  Community is founded upon virtues, modes of behavior (not abstract ideas) that include but are not limited to:  Mutual good will, respect and tolerance, common standards and often a common background of experiences and memories that come out of long association.  Members share in a common lot and help each other in an unselfish manner, just as members of a family do.  This is not charity; it is common practice to share built around the idea of generosity:  truly “to give is more blessed than to receive.”  Communities are characterized by caring, fair play, courage, honesty, courtesy, mutual confidence, fraternity, kindliness and mutual planning, consensus building and working together toward common goals, with a sense of common responsibility.  They are built on direct, intimate acquaintanceship and understanding.

Community is also about place.  We are a product of the soil out of which our community grows.  The loss of community has come with the loss of our sense of being in nature, of living within the cycle of seasons, of drawing our sustenance from the land.  We have forgotten that we are a part of the natural order of things.  Rebuilding community is largely about rebuilding our place on the land and within the natural ecosystem.

Human beings are born for community.  We crave it.  We cannot be said to be truly human except through relations with others, and the more authentic, rich and genuine that relationship is, the more we are human.  Our capacity for language, hardwired into our brains, is part of our communal essence.  It is the tool for human association.  In the absence of community, in the absence of proper socialization, we are not even healthy.  The original Greek meaning for the word “idiot” was “a totally private individual.”  By that standard, today we have an “idiot” civilization.  We are all in it, as one wry sage put it, alone.

Community nurtures the family.  The finer human qualities of life, good manners, civility, consideration, helpfulness, are learned in childhood and they are learned through imitation.  Refinement, dignity of bearing, and forbearance are passed down by example, from parents, from kin, from elders.

Some Things Community is Not

The traits of community do not originate in government, business, schools, art or science.  These are each the products of communal association and not the cause.  The proof of this claim is seen when communities fail.  When they fail, civilization itself inevitably crumbles.  Historians Gibbons, Spengler, Sorokin and Toynbee, among others, and more recently Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond, have rendered very explicit accounts of the failures of great civilizations.  It is perhaps more than coincidental that when civilizations fail, out of the ruins grow new villages, new communities, bearing the seeds of the next outgrowth of civilization.

Community is a concept that does not apply to groups that act together in an impersonal manner.  Single purpose associations do not constitute community.  It requires a cross-section of life.  Churches and other associations, even if they develop a rich social life as well as religious or cultural activities may, but do not necessarily, form communities.  A housing development is not a community.  Even a retirement village may be anything but a community.

Industrial, urban civilization has changed the very structure of human relationship.  After thousands of years of pastoral, agricultural existence, the course of the world has turned in the direction of impersonal mechanistic organization.  The process is built into our schools.  Social institutions may well suppress community and our essential humanity.  True, progress has overcome much of the narrow superstitions and mindless taboos, intrusive and coercive patterns that stifled personal freedom and dignity through the ages, often depriving people of their humanity and manifest through disenfranchisement and in serfdom and slavery but there has been a heavy cost.  As villages grow into towns and cities and rural people are displaced to cities, many of the conditions that fostered community and family are lost.  What has come to be called “postmodern” society is actually hostile to values of any form. 

Re-Inventing Community

The qualities of true community need not be lost.  They are widely cherished and seek expression.  It is possible that the conditions for their revival can be re-established.  Many earnest community builders have been working hard to do so.

Community is no longer an accident of birth. It is no longer just growing close to each other.  It is rather voluntary association based on shared interests.  But, can we have community that no longer monopolizes the whole life of its members?  Can we find intimate association that satisfies the craving for a sense of belonging but preserves individuality and autonomy of belief?

Community is above all participatory.  It requires time and commitment.  It involves a sense of moral obligation, of duty, of service to others.  It is difficult to achieve such commitment without the powerful sense of motivation that comes out of religious conviction or other transformative experiences that define our lives.

The payoff of community is how it makes us feel.  That payoff comes from a reciprocal exchange of good will.  The expression “as we give so we receive” is self-evident only within a community.  Community is health giving.  In return it gives us self-esteem, confidence and courage.

The community must be self-governing.  All members must have a voice.  Each person should be able to freely and frankly express an opinion.  Decisions must be made by consensus, and a unanimous consensus is vital.  Once a decision is made the entire community marches to the same drummer.  If it is the wrong beat the need to change it will quickly become apparent.

Beyond the function of coordinating or administering to the needs of the community, leaders have no special status.  Indeed, if leaders see their role as anything other than a service they can endanger the community.  Their entire function is to meet a clearly identified need as expeditiously as possible, in as detached a manner as possible.  Where power concentrates the nature of the group is transformed, and when a single, charismatic, unchallengeable leader emerges the group loses its humanity.

The entire existence of the community is predicated upon nurturing human association.  It requires not just an initial commitment but also a sustained effort.  The hardest part will always be creating the core group, building the foundation of its primary relationship and launching it.  Like a rocket headed for space it requires the generation of an awesome burst of energy that, sustained through an appropriate time, will establish it as a functioning, independent entity.  The rocket seeks to break free from the earth.  The community seeks also to break free, but from the chaotic wilderness of activity called urban industrial society.

A subtle attractive force is a factor in both cases.  In the physical universe gravity is the universal attractor that holds the sun and the earth and the moon and the entire universe in perpetual connection.  In the human, spiritual, realm the universal attractor is love.  We must first love ourselves as worthy beings.  Only then can we love each other.  We must love the essence, that creative potential, which forms this universe.  Unless we believe community is good, true and beautiful, and unless we believe community is one of the great purposes of life, we will not likely raise much above our material, market-driven existence.  Enlightened men and women know there must be meaning and purpose in life.  Community, more than any other force in human society, gives us that meaning and purpose.  Community justifies our existence, encourages our growth and self-realization and brings out of a collective humanity the best that it is capable of, and even more, for we have little idea just what the true, ultimate potential of this thing we call human is capable of achieving.

Transition Centre holds community and economy as symbiotic.  You can’t have one without the other and they must each be carefully nurtured to meet the needs of each other.  The architecture we are developing unites community and economy into an integral ecosystem.

The Road to a Sustainable Future

A sustainable future is a high priority for many.  The core value of the sustainability movement is to live our lives in a manner such that we do not deprive future generations of an equitable life.  That is a moral issue.  Another issue is the destructive potential of climate change as the result of massive consumption of fossil fuel. 

Can we achieve either of these objectives?  Do we have a clear plan for what has to be done in order to do so?  Can we quantify what must be done?  Do we have the leadership and organizational capacity to mobilize the resources needed to achieve these objectives?  These are the questions “The Road to a Sustainable Future” addresses.

By the Numbers

Perhaps the most dramatic fact is the steady increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  These concentrations have been precisely measured and ice core samples have given us hundreds of thousands of years of data.  The science is there.  The evidence of human causation is clear, and yet there are many deniers.

The steady rise in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution is merely an indication of the progress of economic development; first in Europe and North America and increasingly the rest of the world.  Economic progress is grounded upon the production of energy and that means burning fossil fuels.

The rise in greenhouse gases and the associate increase in global warming are represented as a “J,” or “hockey stick” curve.  Another, and congruent (closely correlated), J-curve is the development of technology as defined by the number of major scientific discoveries and the number of patents issued.  The third, also congruent, J-curve, is the rise in human population.  In short, these trends represent a compounded, geometric rate of growth.

Another fact is that most of the resources we use are non-renewable, that is, there is a fixed quantity of them; for example, energy resources like coal, oil and gas (and we could include uranium).  As we use these resources, remaining reserves become increasingly difficult to exploit and cost per unit of energy inevitably rises.  At some point, if we haven’t already, we will deplete half the known reserves.  At some point the cost of production will become prohibitive. 

The beginning of the industrial revolution roughly coincides with the perfection of the steam engine by James Watt and a new model of capitalistic economics established by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.  Let’s call it the 1770s.  By the 1870s, industry had become the dominate economic model and progress has continued at an ever-accelerating pace since.

The idea of progress is a relatively new one.  It became popular just about the time the industrial revolution took hold.  Before the modern age there was little sense of a thing called “history;” people expected to live out their lives much as their ancestors had.  Since the ideas of history and progress became popular, a lot of thoughtful people have been trying to predict the future.  Nobody has ever got it right.  A lot of science fiction visions didn’t happen.  What did happen was pretty much unexpected, like the personal computer and internet.

Humans have become a major force on this planet.  The change we cause has a profound effect of the life of the planet as a whole and upon the biosphere that sustains all life.  We are getting much better at measuring change.  Many intelligent, well informed, people are concerned about the effect of continued change as we have experienced it during the last few decades.  We will either get our game together for a Start Trek future, or something else.  It’s going to take a lot of hard thinking and a lot of hard work to take control of the economy and the effects it is creating.

If we had some type of dashboard, a set of gauges to measure the “speed, temperature and pressure” elements of the economy, there would be a panel of them that would be troubling.  We might add another gauge for the economy.  Its metric would be world GNP.  The ideal of progress is continued growth.  The reality is the adverse effect this continued develop might have on society and the environment. 

Measures of Sustainability

The classical model of sustainability has three “pillars:” Economy, society and environment.  The economy is the driver, the independent variable.  There is, however, a feedback loop and that is the effect the economy has on society and the environment and also the impact of environmental degradation and social instability on the economy.  Overall, most people think the effect on society has been positive:  growth and the good life are coeval.  A declining world economy would, in fact, have a weighty impact on billions of people.

When the UN defined sustainable development, its objective was, in fact, global economic growth.  The goal was to eliminate poverty and hunger, to provide health and education benefits, to reduce the causes of conflict, for all of humankind.  But they asked how we could sustain it.

The UN is a governmental entity.  The foundation of government – global, national or local – is human health and safety, not the environment per se.  Concern about the environment, is preservation of health and safety and particularly for future generations.  But there is a Catch 22 involved.  However you cut the deck, development demands more resources.  Ideally, we learn to make better use of what we have, to employ renewable resource.  Bottom line, however, growth comes first.  You can blame corporations and governments all you want but ordinary people, your friends and neighbors, and those in the developing world, want a better life.

The Thin Green Wedge

We live in a world that is increasingly “democratic:” the opinion of the majority determines the course of events.  True, some countries are marginally democratic at best, but it is hard to find any country in which the majority of its citizens want to stop economic growth.  The Paris Agreement did evoke a consensus about the importance of curbing climate change.  It did not reach agreement about how that would be achieved.  The US, which consumes a quarter of the world’s energy and the lion’s share of other resources (either directly or indirectly) is now under an administration that is not in agreement with either climate claims or efforts to curb energy and other resource consumption.  Yes, there is increasing use of renewable energy but, for the most part as a supplement, not a replacement, for fossil fuel consumption.  The prospect for holding global warming to 2⁰C, which is the theoretical threshold to runaway climate effects, is vanishingly small.

Some people have an urgent sense that we need to take control of our world; a lot more simply want more of the good things industrial life offers.  In the US, around one in eight people have some lifestyle commitment to sustainability, about one percent are highly committed.  However, nearly one in three do not believe in climate change and half again as many don’t think it is caused by humans.  This is about half of us.  Another third of the population is concerned about climate change but more interested in maintaining the good life.  In short, about half (the yellow wedge) are more or less on the fence.

REconomy

The weak link in the climate – economy – environment triptych, is the economy.  The economy is the driver.  It has immense inertia.  Only a radical few (in the hard-green one percent) want to end economic growth.

Sustainability focuses mostly either on society or on the environment rather than on the economy.   A green lifestyle (the thin green wedge) involves using fewer resources, installing solar panels, buying efficient appliances and cars, recycling and other things one can do for the good of the planet.  Activist seek to influence political leaders to adopt and support environmental friendly policies; and pressure major corporations to become responsible.

The economy is market driven:  it is the result of what people want to buy.  It is the result of producing products and services that are better and/or less costly than those of competitors.  Governments do regulate because that is their job.  They make a lot of compromises.  Few have anything like a comprehensive plan.  Corporations, and governments and nonprofits, do seek cost savings found in reduction in energy and other resource uses – just sound management.

The production and distribution of goods and services is the foundation of society.  Business entrepreneurship is one of the most effective methods we know for organizing human capability.  But business is about making profits.  It has a short-term outlook.  When the economy begins to deplete resources and spoil the environment, business becomes a problem.

Do we have a good idea of what a sustainable economy would look like; an economy that lives within the energy and resource budget of the planet?  Will achieving that involve government regulation to control the economy to the degree required?  If so, where does the money come from to create new industries, new markets, new technologies, and develop the new workforce?  Does government come up with the trillions of dollars (equivalent) needed for the transformation?  Or do we have to go to the market?

Bottom line (that lovely business term) is that economic transformation must pay for itself and that means it must take command of the marketplace.  We do, in fact, have good ideas how to proceed along these lines.  There are excellent models of green business and social entrepreneurship.  We now have a legal framework for the Benefit Corporation, a business model that mandates social and environmental benefit.  Technological innovation is driving new markets.  The cost of renewable energy is expected soon to be lower than that produced by fossil fuels.  The cost of energy is a cornerstone of corporate sustainability.  Rising cost of energy and other resources drive business innovation.  Major corporations are developing risk management models around the scarcity of water, land, energy and other mineral resources.  As conditions change, more major corporations are finding sustainability just makes good business sense.  The economy constantly transforms itself.  We need only to accelerate and direct the forces already at work.  But first we need to decide what to do.  That takes leadership.

Deep Leadership

The key element in transformation is leadership.  Do we need a new style of leadership?  I believe the answer is clearly yes.

Each era of human history has had its own form of leadership.  From tribal to aristocratic to corporate, there has been a steady progression of knowledge and skills in the management of human affairs.  This is in no small part due to the increasing complexity of life especially during the industrial era.  The industrial era itself has gone through stages, and done so quickly.  Scientific management, for example, dominated the corporate landscape a century ago.  Our economy has transformed from manufacturing to services, from blue collar to white, from manual skill to information and knowledge.  We have now gone digital and virtual.

What type of leadership do we need?  The past century relied heavily on the specialized expert.  The demand for such will not diminish in the future but it is increasingly clear that a more generalized, comprehensive, style is required.  We need people who know a lot of things but most importantly, who can see patterns of activity and make the connections.

As Einstein so famously said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.  Great scientist and inventors have steadily pushed human progress.  Since Einstein’s breakthroughs, our knowledge of the universe and our understanding of the human mind have developed immensely.  We now need a leadership style that can bring order to progress and achieve a secure and stable future.  This will take a new kind of thinking.

The vast complexity of World War II produced not only the computer but a new thinking style, general systems theory.  The two are, in fact, closely interrelated.  The general systems model has, however, been slow to evolve in a specialist-driven academic and work environment.  There have been a number of innovators in this thinking style.  One of them, Bucky Fuller, call this new type “comprehensivists,” or generalists if you prefer.  Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are examples of this emerging style.  It was a Microsoft principle that a good programmer can hold the entire structure of the application in his or her mind.  Jobs approached his work from a design perspective; Apple devices are built to embed themselves into the behavior of the user.

The models are plentiful but the development of this style of leadership is, at best, hit-or-miss.   Curiously, many of these innovators were college dropouts.  I’m not sure where you can find a degree program in comprehensivists leadership.  There are, however, some very good books, training programs and some consultants who do address this issue.  Transition Centre is pursuing a more systematic educational program for what it calls Deep Leadership.

The Deep Leader, in short, is a generalist, or comprehensivists lifelong learner, thinks critically, thinks in an ecological (social as well as natural) framework, has a big-picture view of the world, is an avid networker, an excellent communicator, possess a wide variety of mental and manual skills, and is a talented organizer.  They are good at connecting the dots.

Community

The third element of our model is community.  As the organizational style has evolved from authority and hierarchy to flat and fluid, consensus has largely replaced rules in the formation of social groups.  Social capital in the US, however, has become increasingly problematic.  The urban-industrial economy has eroded traditional forms of community and the digital media has created an entirely new dynamic of association. 

Margaret Mead’s theory of small groups changing the world is not a romantic myth.  It starts with someone who has an idea and the first few people (it takes about four of them) who support that idea.  If they work hard enough, an organization forms around them.

New groups do not appear out of a vacuum; they arise out of a conversation.  In short, there is some type of community, however tenuous, involved.  This brings us to the question of what does it take to make a community?  The short answer is a common set of values, a shared set of ideas and beliefs, a common vision of the world, and a sense of mutuality.

The sustainability movement has been said to be the largest in the history of the planet.  Does it represent a community?  Unfortunately, no.  It is diverse, fragmented, incoherent, poorly focused, unorganized; it lacks social cohesion.  The one thing its adherents have in common is that we need to do something to make the future livable; but too little real organization.

Green entrepreneur Paul Hawkins once created a web site to list sustainable organizations around the world.  There were at least 100,000 of them.  In my community, a region of some 160,000 people, we have identified nearly 600 local organizations, groups, programs and a few outstanding individuals, who are involved in sustainability.  Few of these, however, know much about the rest of the list. 

A community is an ecosystem, it is a spontaneous organization, but we have little comprehension of how it works.  An ecosystem is a natural economic model; it is the way nature works.  We need to better understand this and we need to developing better tools for building functional networks that weave our community into a self-aware, coherent, whole.

One of our major problems is how little people know about the sustainability movement, at home or around the world, and how little they know of the long and rich tradition of the movement.  A community must have a common understanding of its traditions.  Attached is a partial list of names, of people and organizations, that have defined this movement.  See how many you can identify.  And then there is a sustainability quiz to check your perception.

Sustainability is becoming a tradition, a culture if you will, in a small, but increasing, number of communities.  It takes about a generation for a culture to form, now about the time since the founding of the sustainability movement in the 1970s and 1980s.  A considerable literature is forming about the sustainability movement and this emerging culture.  It seems an appropriate time to systemize this knowledge and create a model to promotes its progress, to form a common vision, gain a stronger sense of community, and to mobilize more effective, more focused, better resourced, initiatives. 

It’s going to take a plan make this happen.  It’s going to take leadership.  And it’s going to take organization to accelerate the transformative change needed to reshape the future.  This is the mission that Transition Centre and allied groups have undertaken.

Sustainability Quotient

How many names do you recognize on this list?

How many can you give a 25-word description of?

What is missing?

John Muir

John Burroughs

Teddy Roosevelt

John James Audubon

Charles Darwin

Wendell Berry

Wes Jackson

Henry David Thoreau

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Borsodi

Mildred Loomis

School of Living

Scott and Helen Nearing

Bill McKibben

David Orr

Vandana Shiva

James Hansen

Gaia hypothesis

Rachel Carson

Al Gore

Rob Hopkins

Permaculture

Gifford Pinchot

Sierra Club

Aldo Leopold

Arne Naess

Thomas Berry

Theodore Roszak

Lewis Mumford

Georges I. Gurdjieff

G. J. Bennett

Peter Senge

Bucky Fuller

Alfred Korzybski

General Systems Theory

Fritjof Capra

George Leonard

David Holmgren

Bill Mollison

John Ruskin

Earth Day

Hazel Henderson

E. F. Schumacher

Paul Hawken

James Lovelock

Carl Sagan

Ken Wilber

Marilyn Ferguson

Carol Sanford

Edward Abby

Oswald Spengler

Arnold Toynbee

P. A. Sorokin

Patrick Geddes

E. O. Wilson

Systems Ecology

Local

Make your own list of key local organizations, groups and activities.

Sustainability QUIZ

Some answers are factual.  The remainder should be your own thoughts.

1.                What is the current probability of achieving a 2⁰C limit on global warming?

2.                What do you think life will be like in your community in ten years?

3.                TRUE OR FALSE:  The most critical resources today are land, water, energy, other mineral resources and grown products.

4.                Which is the most critical resource?

5.                In the sustainability model (environment, economy and society) where is the weakest link?

6.                What is the projected population of the Earth in 2050?

7.                What is the long-term carrying capacity of the Earth?

8.                What is REconomy?

9.                What is the most effective type of organization for transformative change?

10.             What is the most effective style of leadership for transformative change?

11.             What is the most effective level to bring about change:  Global, National or Local?

12.             What other questions do you have?