Bryan Scott is an Otago Regional Councillor. With varied experience in science, engineering and agriculture, Bryan has a focus on integrating the science and the decision making.
Thriving region with a community focus
Graying of our environment
Unintended consequences of development
We need the environment to be there for our children, but we need to do better than that – a move to regenerative.
Superpower: Keeping going, generating ideas – without caring who gets credit for them
There’s a strong technical solution bias – ICT is the new technical fix that will allow us to not change our lifestyles in order to achieve sustainability – and of course that’s hard to say no to, it’s very tempting to believe in such a narrative.
Dr Josefin Wangel is Associate Professor in sustainable urban development at the Division of Environmental Strategies Research at KTH in Sweden. Her focus is on how sustainability is understood and put to practice in urban planning and policy making. She uses futures studies (mainly backcasting and design fictions), systems analysis (including target formulation and sustainability assessments), stakeholder analysis and discourse analysis.
Talking points
I knew wanted to try to save the world through environmental engagement of some sort.
I studied sciences because I thought that if I knew the sciences then people would listen to me – today I can see that that was a naïve understanding of the workings of society.
As an 18 year old, my understanding of a lack sustainability was that it was a lack of knowledge that makes society unsustainable.
I quickly realised that people knew, that it was bad for the environment to drive a car, for example, but still they drove a car -and that is when I realised that my natural science based education wasn’t really apt for answering the questions that I had.
Today if I had to choose, I would place myself more in the social sciences than the natural sciences.
Why aren’t we behaving in the way we should be behaving in order to save the planet?
The discrepancy between our stated intention and what we actually do can be found at all layers of society from the individual, through the community to the planners and politicians. I think this is where we can find leverage points to actually start doing sustainability.
Environmental effects are disconnected in time and space. If I eat chocolate I know the effects on me, but if I drive the car everyday then the effects are somewhere else, ten years from now – these effects are harder to grasp.
Sustainability issues are the result of collective action, or collective inaction. I don’t gain weight when my partner eats chocolate.
Sustainability is more than the functioning of ecosystems, the other dimension is social issues. However, I don’t think sustainability is the right word for social issues, it should be social justice or social desirabilities – for me sustainability – the ability to sustain is very much connected to the ecosystems.
Three step model: Brundtland…pillars interact. Then de-construct…a discursive perspective, talking of multiple sustainabilities, that our understanding of the world is always socially constructed…then students have to make up their own construction…that links to their own discipline.
It is important to dare to be very serious about the threats implied by surpassing the planetary boundaries.
The trick is to get them to realise at the bottom of their hearts what sustainability is about, and how deeply unsustainable and unfair the world is today. And then provide them with the tools for doing something about that.
If want sustainability to last…then people have to care at a personal level,
“Sustainable†urban development areas in Stockholm…show window for Swedish sustainability and ecotechnologies…however none of these areas are actually sustainable if by sustainable you have an understanding of absolute levels of pressure that the ecosystem – if you look at resource use, these areas aren’t sustainable, and if you look at resource use in terms of the global population it becomes obvious these areas aren’t socially just either.
This does come very close to greenwash.
There’s a strong technical solution bias – ICT is the new technical fix that will allow us to not change our lifestyles in order to achieve sustainability – and of course that’s hard to say no to, it’s very tempting to believe in such a narrative.
We in Sweden have wonderful life, but that is only possible because people in other parts of the world have lousy working conditions and suffer environmental degradation that the production of consumption good sold in Sweden results in.
For us, the status quo looks like the best option, but at the global scale, and taking social justice into consideration, then it isn’t sustainable.
As an individual it is hard, sometimes impossible, to see the consequences of collective actions and take responsibility for it.
(is sustainability a luxury?) You choose what to invest funds in, you can choose to invest in highways, or you can choose to invest in railways.
Do it yourself urbanism: people having opportunity to influence built environments themselves.
(Success) Interview in a big daily newspaper, I was able to start a national discussion about alternative discourses of sustainability.
(Activist) I used to be.
(Your teaching and research is normative) if you have a title with the word sustainability in it, then you are, at least if you are doing what your title says you are.
(Motivatation) I really love my work. I get to work on something I find super interesting and important.
(Challenges) Getting married. I was just appointed of director of collaboration and impact.
(Miracle) That everyone would realise the two dimensions ecological sustainability and social justice – and that economy is just a part of the social. The wedding cake, but with only two layers.
Everything around you is an engineered system – start demanding of the engineers to change things.
Prof Susan Krumdieck is developing Transition Engineering at the University of Canterbury. We talk about green energy mythologies, transition engineering of complex systems, growing up in Colorado, and how her son’s persistent questioning led her to look for ways or making real change.
Talking points
My concern is what we are doing that is not sustainable, and changing that – transition engineering.
People can adapt to whatever situation they’re in, and they can do that if they have the ability to see what’s happening, understand what’s happening, trust one another and work together on it.
Mechanical engineers have made these big systems work really well, but they have not been given the task of winding them down in a way that is sustainable.
The conundrum, that if you are going to engineer your systems even more tso that you can overcome bad behaviour – you’ve introduced more reliance on the engineered system instead of reliance on people thinking.
How engineering interacts with people is at the core of sustainability
We tell ourselves these big stories – and then start to believe them.
Green energy mythologies – may be as important as mythologies have always been for people – that we have a belief in our own progress and in our own development, and
we need stories and mythologies that support that belief. But the facts tell us we are in trouble.
Our development, our progress – that we’ve been so success at is a trap, and a bit suicidal – a lot suicidal – and we don’t know how to deal with that except to believe more in the story.
The party we’ve been having – we’ve come to a trough that is bottomless, an all-you-can-eat banquet with a free returns card, and we we’ve come to think that’s how things are, but we gotten quite obese – it’s not good for us, it will kill us, and yet we’re afraid of change.
We know continued growth is doomed, so we’ve shifted our growth over to the green category – it’s still doomed, the miracle green energy is a myth.
Basically anything that anybody sends you with a big “Yay!” Solar roads, house batteries…everybody, your green energy myth radar should just ping.
Solar panels…something that says to people something about you that you will probably be quite smug about…it will fulfil an emotional need that you have, but what
I call it is green bling. – you didn’t need it, it didn’t change your circumstances or add value to your life. It is decoration for your house, not a legitimate part of the energy system. But something you couldn’t see – perhaps insulation – would make so much more difference.
If we really want to talk about the route to sustainable, what we really have to talk about is what is not sustainable – that’s it.
We’ll never really be sustainable. All we can do is look at the most stupid things we do, and tell the engineers that are making them “thank you very much, but we want something that isn’t that bad, we want you to rethink this.
Anything that is disposable, not reusable, not returnable – all of those we’re engineered that way on purpose, we can change that.
Engineering has to be where we start with these changes.
Somebody has to actually do things that changes things – transition engineering.
Adaptive change have to be engineered – it has to be done on purpose.
Green energy myths give false hope.
Simple solutions might be the answer, but they have to be real.
The way we use energy has become so embedded in our social structure and our belief system – we’re talking a fundamental change in our shared cultural values.
It is possible to do change- to take on what seemed like impossible situations. We’ve done it before in safety engineering and environmental engineering.
You can’t solve the world in one do, so frame the problem – every engineered system can be re-engineered.
The entire profession is responsible for everything that we’ve done that is unsustainable.
We’ve reached a point where our progress, our own technological success is indeed the biggest threat to us.
At the turn of the last Century, our factories, mines and transport were engineered in a way that they were extremely successful for the owners, investors making huge amounts of money…but people were dying or being maimed at rates we can’t contemplate today…so there was a huge change over 40-50 years – that was the impact of safety engineering.
The change was exponential, so huge at the beginning – so simply think about what’s wrong and work on that.
When we make a big mess we need the engineering field to look at itself and say “we can do better than this”.
Everything around you is an engineered system – start demanding of the engineers to change things.
You are in a system that is engineered to work beautifully, it is also self destructive, it is also designed to fail.
Turn around and look at the people who designed these systems and say “I hope you’re busy figuring out how to change things”.
We need the emergence of transition engineering just like we needed safety engineering, natural hazard engineering, environmental engineering.
We’ve got ourselves into a progress trap, we’ve done a very good job and now it is the biggest threat to ourselves and we need to figure that out. We as engineers need to get together and do what we do and get this sorted out.
Most people don’t understand what is going on behind the engineering curtain, but they can demand that engineers fix this stuff they’ve made.
(Activist?) Indeed an activist within the engineering profession. I am pushing the comfort zone of the engineering professional to challenge them to take on this responsibility.
They say “we already do sustainability engineering – recycling systems and so on” but this is a bolt-on to unsustainable systems. We need engineering to boldly take on the big unsustainable systems.
I wish solar, wind, hydrogen were miracle solutions, but they’re not.
If I can help any engineer not waste the ten years I wasted on Hydrogen, then that gets us closer to real change.
Transition is about change, about changing engineering, and if you can change engineering, you can change the world.
(Motivation) My son said “Mom, you have to do something, if something doesn’t change then it’s going to be really bad, you have to figure out how to change things”.
There’s a future out there where we have changed things now. In 100 years we people look back, it’s a good thing that that thing happened. What is that thing?
Anyone who is trying to work on a positive outcome is part of the positive outcome.
The difference between a future where the experiment we started a couple of hundred years ago, the future where we keep hoping for green technology miracles and the don’t come but we keep hoping and telling ourselves that story as civilisation winds down in not a nice way and in the meantime they didn’t change to make the climate more liveable, and a different future, where something profound happened.
Ask 100 people what changed 100 years ago that made a profound change, not one would say “safety engineering”.
(Challenge?) Establish transition engineering
(Miracle?) I think about this all the time – what is the trigger point for change? For me it is funding to establish transition engineering.
(Advice?) Stay with the math and science, especially the young women. We need people who understand that it’s complex systems but you can change them – you just have to think in systemic ways – and if we could could get women to be half of the tiny percentage of people who are engineers, we’d we well on our way.
Do not accept anything less than a global perspective, learn what is known but do not accept that we have to cook this planet as part of human requirements.
The problems of degradation are not just the sole domain of biophysical scientists.
Professor Bruce Clarkson is Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Waikato, and is the Interim Director of the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge. He is recognised as one of New Zealand’s foremost authorities on ecological restoration. We talk about his background, what we learnt from island and mainland sanctuaries, and the opportunities and challenges of restoring ecosystems in urban environments.
Talking points
Most people don’t experience nature in a way we did in previous generations
How might you restore indigenous nature in an environment where people can access them more easily?
New Zealand has extremely high levels of endemism…if we don’t look after these native plants and animals, no one else is going to do it…this is our responsibility.
This is our biological heritage, this is what makes NZ special and different, it’s our responsibility as stewards of the land to maintain our natural heritage.
What you are really trying to do is manage the whole system, but a focus on birds will have positive spinoffs for the rest of the ecosystem
So what you are trying to achieve in the longer term is a recovery of the whole system, not just the bird populations.
It has to be a mix and match of approaches and a portfolio of places.
We’re working for the very long term so we have to build resilience into the system.
If we don’t do it, we will be responsible for the extinctions because we brought in the agents of change.
If we protect species, we protect their house.
We can treat our native birds as the umbrella species for the whole system that we’re trying to maintain, protect and restore.
Cities have some advantages over wildlands in terms of protecting native plants and animals…just think of the example of grazing animals.. you don’t have to confront the problems of goats and grazing cattle.
Looking after your own backyard and being a steward of something you cherish.
Start at a scale you can manage, have a plan and progressively recover what you are trying to achieve.
You can make big mistakes, the classic mistake people make in gully restoration is that they bite off more than they can handle.
I tend to be an optimist. Yes, there’s a lot of negative out there, and there’s a lot of degradation of the environment still going on. It would be an interesting research question, what would be the threshold point at which recovery tipped the balance back to the point where there was more improvement going on than degradation? I think in some points in our region we are very close to that threshold. Overall it is still a fact that New Zealand is still losing things. Forests are being cleared, wetlands are being drained, nowhere near the rates they were previously when we were in the land development phase, but some of that is still going on. There are large parts of the Department of Conservation estate where there little active management is occurring, and those areas are also going backwards. But the point is that there are significant areas where we are making a difference. So I see it in a more optimistic way. Know also, that we do have the technologies to do more and more of this restoration, it’s really a question of how much time, effort and funding is New Zealand as a nation prepared to put into it to get us to the threshold of recovery at regional and national scale.
We’re trying to bridge the interdisciplinary gaps.
The point is how we deal with interdisciplinary problems.
The problems of degradation are not just the sole domain of biophysical scientists. To get the results that you want you need expertise in a wide range of areas. This is another advantage of working in urban areas, there are a lot of professions, all with interests in how we might restore urban environments.
We want engineers who not only know about engineering, but know about the environment as well.
I think the solutions to most (environmental) problems are actually about how we build bridges between the different disciplines…to come together and work collaboratively.
Increasingly, graduates from university are expected not just to know about their discipline, they are expected to work in multidisciplinary teams, on projects where people are trying to achieve solutions to particular problems.
It’s not just about a technical fix, it’s about understanding how you can do things in different ways, often the ways things use to be.
Restoration ecology is difficult, reconstructing an ecosystem takes time, but if you go into it knowing that and how the system works, you can make a long term plan for restoration, a plan for a process that might be inter-generational.
A 500 year plan, with milestones along the way
Once you’ve started a project, once you see process, people take pride in the process. It’s quite inspirational what a change you can make on the landscape in such a short time.
(Activist?) People who work in universities in many respects are people who love ideas, and love the debate around ideas – and if that is what an activist is, then essentially that’s what you are. You’re looking at systems, you’re understanding the system, and you’re trying to pass on your knowledge of how best to manage that system in an effective way. If that is what an activist is, then that’s what you are.
(Motivation?) Students, seeing the progress my students make, and where they end up. Being able to contribute to knowledge and process. The process of protecting and restoring plant communities and the animals that go with them – for some reason as a child that gelled with me, and I’m still passionate about achieving the same thing. Making a difference.
(Challenges?) Staying fit and healthy and keeping going.
(Miracle?) A silver bullet for pest control. Some new way that is socially acceptable for controlling mammalian predators that prey on our native birds. That would very rapidly and radically alter our landscape.
(Advice?) Look around your own neighbourhood, find out who are the people doing this sort of work and go along and give them a hand because they need all the help they can get.
The embodied energy in a disposable battery is fifty times more than the energy that can be extracted from the battery.
Dr Craig Jones of Circular Ecology is a leader in embodied energy and carbon footprinting of products, services and buildings, and in Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). Is is the author of the Inventory of Carbon & Energy an embodied energy and carbon database, and wrote the first book on embodied carbon in the construction industry. Circular Ecology, he tells us, comes from mixing circular economics with industrial ecology.
Talking points
Many kids start out with an environmental passion, but he older they get it just sort of disappears from them – they just get used to how society works at the moment – buy things, dispose of things, not really thinking about them.
It is disappointing that they don’t teach more about the environment and sustainability in engineering.
Engineering, design, is responsible for the products we have. It is a great opportunity to reduce the environmental impact of all the products that we use.
They (engineering graduates) don’t know enough about how to reduce impacts of products, and they just don’t have training and education to know how to do that.
It’s not the culture of companies to reduce impacts unless embedded in policies – which is not yet mainstream.
If you don’t take the opportunity when you design a building to reduce the embodied carbon then that opportunity is lost forever.
The embodied carbon, in a very short time frame, you are using 15-20 years worth of operational emissions. If you don’t take the opportunity to reduce that carbon you can’t go back, that opportunity has been lost forever.
We have the technology today – it is not really a technical issue.
It takes more energy to make a kilogram of paper than a kilogram of steel
Even though I prefer to read reports and documents on paper, I print about nothing these days – you do get used it.
Even as someone who does this full time, what’s a kilogram of carbon really? It is a difficult unit to understand, so I try to consider it in terms of units that are a bit more meaningful…if you did things differently, what is the saving in terms of other things that you do: driving the car or watching TV?
I think water footprints could quickly get more attention.
Too many people confuse carbon footprint with sustainability, and too many people confuse environmental benefits with sustainability.
True sustainability balances environmental factors with social factors and with economic factors.
If you are starting from nothing, then carbon and energy is a good place to start. But it shouldn’t be displayed or marketed as sustainability. Climate Change is one of the more pressing challenges we have at the moment, but there are other important issues out there: toxicity; eutrophication; inequality…
We need to look after our planet so we can hand it down to our children and our grandchildren. For them to have the same quality of life that we have had then we need to change – the planet needs to be healthy for that to happen.
There are so many environmental labels, it needs to be simplified and should be officially backed.
If all manufacturers of similar products had to adhere to the same label, the same assessment method, there would be nowhere to hide, you couldn’t hide behind creating your own label and doing it differently.
At the moment, most consumers don’t understand the impacts – their products are disconnected from the consequences – so the masses will just ignore those labels.
Recycling is not a benefit, it should be expected rather than congratulated.
If we are to live in a truly sustainable manner we need to stop congratulating ourselves for doing things that should be expected.
It needs to become an expectation, we should feel guilty for throwing away that plastic bottle or tin can.
If you recycle your tin can, that saves enough energy to power your TV for four hours.
The life span of a tin can is two months – from mining to discarding – so even with a 55% recycling rate, most of it is going to landfill.
A circular economy means New business models that are still profitable for companies
The embodied energy in a battery is fifty times more than the energy that can be extracted from the battery.
There are companies doing sustainability properly and they are making a profit. But it is not yet seen as mainstream. Those companies have the advantage of being ahead of the curve.
There is an opportunity for consumers, but there’s not really enough information in an easily digestible form.
(Activist) No. I do try achieve gains through my day-time job. And through giving out information freely.
(Motivation) Environmental gain.
(Challenges) There are more and more people in this area, it is becoming competitive. Reducing the costs of the assessments, especially on whole product lines.
(Miracle) Something in policy and legislation that mandated companies to measure and reduce the environmental footprints of their products, buildings and services.
(Advice) Everyone does have a choice when they buy things. You don’t have to always make that choice, other things come into it, but now and again just think about the environmental impacts of something when you purchase it. And even, think do I need that? Quite often you buy things and they end up at the bottom of the cupboard. Think about that, and it reduces the amount of things you buy and never use.
This conversation was recorded at the very pleasant Bordeaux Quay alongside Bristol’s historic Floating Harbour in September 2014.
The trick is to make a business out of being more sustainable.
Dr Sophie Hallstedt is a researcher and lecturer at in the Department of Strategic Sustainable Development at
Blekinge Institute of Technology. Her research interest is sustainable product development and the question of how a strategic sustainability perspective can be integrated and implemented into product innovation process with focus on the early phases.
This conversation is one of a series of four recorded at Blekinge Institute of Technology Department of Strategic Sustainable Development in September 2014.
Talking points
Strategic sustainable development means you you take a strategic approach to the success ladder.
Supporting companies to consider sustainability as part of everything they do.
If you talk to individuals in an organisation, many are concerned about the unsustainable society that we live in, and they want to contribute…but as part of a bigger organisation it’s not always so easy to do that – to put that on the agenda when there are other issues that are putting pressure on the company.
You need to have a long term perspective. If you only look at today, you might have one choice, but if you look 10-15 years ahead, what would be the best alternative if you could then choose for today. It may be best to invest in the thing that is more expensive today but will in the long term be more beneficial.
We are developing support for including the long term in decision making. This is tricky because you don’t know what is going to happen. So we use scenarios.
We have a tool for visualising scenarios.
There’s a danger of reducing to economic terms if you do it too soon. You need to keep it as transparent as possible and also have a qualitative assessment. You need a dialogue around the results. This can be supported by the visualisation of the quantitative results.
It is harder for engineers to accept qualitative results…it helps to visualise it…but the qualitative story is needed.
(Can human rights, human suffering – less tangibles – be represented in a format that makes them equivalent to the numerical values in a decision support system?) You can’t. You can’t put a figure on some sustainability aspects.
But if you are going to support product developers, to support them in their decisions, their designs, then it may be important to help them go from the larger picture to something they can translate and compare.
To make a more sustainable product it is important to collaborate with your partners in its value chain.
Can a product be sustainable?) It depends on how you manage it for the whole lifecycle. It is very difficult to say something is sustainable. You might be able to say more, or less sustainable.
What is strategic sustainable development? What is a sustainable society?
(Role of ecology in engineering degree?) I would think it very useful, to see how everything is connected.
Everything is connected. Even a small change can have catastrophic consequences.
(Consumers). A big impact is to use with care so it lasts longer.
(Decision to buy, are we getting better at supporting through product design the decision not to buy) You have to take responsibility as a consumer, but yes, you will see more of that.
(Is there a sweetspot as a consumer?) A mix. There is a need for companies to make products that enable consumers to choose between alternatives.
To some extent we (as consumers) need to trust the producers that they have taken their responsibility seriously to make their product more sustainable, or as sustainable as it can be at the moment and have a road map.
(but we have to wade through a swamp of greenwash). yes, as consumer, your responsibility is to be aware of that. It’s quite hard, that’s why we have labeling schemes. These aren’t perfect, but they are better than nothing.
You should be aware of the labelling schemes, but you still have to take your own responsibility when you chose your product.
Issues such as ecological issues, production issues and so on are harder for the consumer to see, so these values have to be in the company – what is good for society is also good for us.
(On planned obsolescence) I hope and think there is another way to do products design, so they have a value for lasting a long time, maybe a modular system where you replace parts of the system.
3D printing may cause a new sustainability problem itself if overused.
(Activist?) I wouldn’t call myself an activist – I’m trying to inspire. I want to try to inspire and grow and have a seed to take a direct responsibility to continue to work.
(Challenges) Having companies taking a more active role in bringing in a sustainability perspective in business strategies. I working on describing more good examples so they can see it does have a value.
(Motivation) Trying to contribute, To inspire other people to work with it.
(Miracle) My wishlist would be to have more resources in companies to prioritise this area.
(Advice) Everyone can contribute in their field to a more sustainable society and you should do that – both as a person and in your profession
.
If you come back a year later and they’ve got recycling in the office rather than looking at the main process, that’s a sign that they are not really buying it.
Dr Henrik Ny is a researcher and Sessional Instructor at Blekinge Institute of Technology. His research interests include ecological economics and sustainable product development. He has worked to integrate lifecycle assessment into the environmental management system and the waste treatment and recycling efforts of major industrial companies. Henrik’s current role is to run large research projects together with industry and public institutions. The largest so far is a regional electric vehicle project called Greencharge.
This conversation is one of a series of four recorded at Blekinge Institute of Technology Department of Strategic Sustainable Development in September 2014.
Talking points
I studied engineering as a route to sustainability.
If you did it from scratch it would be much easier…but it rarely happens that you get to do something from scratch.
My PhD was a toolbox for companies to practically integrate strategic sustainability into their products and systems.
Rather than just looking at the systems as they are, we started looking at applying the principles for sustainability.
Substances from the earth’s crust should not be allowed to increase in the system – because then we will have problems now or in the future. So this makes the process of increasing concentrations a problem – before you know what consequences they give.
Chemicals – combinations of emissions from the earth’s crust – these should also not increase.
The third is about other ways to break down natural systems.
The fourth is about social sustainability, because even if we address the ecological issues without the social people will not deal with this in a good way. We need to be happy at the same time.
We have focussed on the process conditions – the increasing concentrations, we’re working with others (Rockstrom) who have set up the boundary conditions for how far those processes can go.
Companies are beginning to understand that so long as they are acting in an unsustainable way, they are taking a risk. It sometimes takes while for them to understand that.
If you are working with someone who is trying to improve, it is sometimes counter productive to be too dogmatic. I never tone done the science or the consequences of something, but I am trying not to tell them how they should run their business.
If you come back a year later and they’ve got recycling in the office rather than looking at the main process, that’s a sign that they are not really buying it.
The nature of something that is so big – holistic – is that sometimes it is so big and blurry that you don’t know where to focus…that’s the value of the framework.
We have added a scoping phase to Life Cycle Assessment where you use the principles of sustainability, so that you can see, just by knowing that you’re looking for substances from the earths crust what you’ve up against… the idea is that you can keep track and not get lost into the detail.
If you want (your analysis) to become dynamic, then you use scenarios and tweak it, system dynamics from a strategic perspective.
The challenge is to do something complex enough to address reality, but not so complex that you don’t understand what is going on.
Putting social systems into that makes it more complex.
(Green Charge) The technology we need is more or less here – so it is more of a social- economic problem: how can you mobilise the necessary actors to act in a coordinated way to make this possible and affordable.
We could say this is how you should be sustainable, but if everyone is bankrupt before they get there then little is won. So we try divide in two steps. First a wish list of the things we want to do. Then we prioritise based on short-term economics.
So we try to find things that will give you money now, and prepare for coming steps.
(are we close to the tipping point for sustainable transport?) Not yet, but within five years.
The status quo is a big barrier.
As long as there are a few good examples of success, we will move forward quite quickly.
Those who don’t move will lose in the transition.
The strategic framework raises a few principles as a common guide for any actor. It is built at such a level that anyone acting in society could, for example identify according to principle one, how they contribute to increasing concentration of substances from the earth’s crust. That can lead to common goals, with different types of actors working together.
The strategic sustainability framework provides a common language so that people from different positions can work together.
When you put a price on externalities and internalise them into the economy, then you are making the economy better. But even with this environmental economics, we might consume them (the environment) anyway but at a higher cost. Ecological Economics attempts to limit this with quota and so on.
We need to think about growth in more nuanced way. Many times growth today is just expanding a wasteful business model where you waste a lot of resources, then you expand that and waste a even more resources. If you transition to a business model where you waste less resources, then you can have economic growth while not wasting as much. It is difficult to achieve this in practice – to have both growth without systematically eroding the environment.
There are different ways to fulfill needs that wouldn’t show up in our current economic systems.
Just enough is not enough. Restorative sustainability…systems that start to improve themselves again. I think this is necessary, because we have destroyed a lot of things.
(Motivation) Realisations when I was very young – looking a car exhausts and asking where they go. The realisation that this is not going to work. Then being able to be part of the solution and just looking at the problem. And I’m quite curious and I like solving problems, simplifying, explaining…and here is the biggest, most interesting problem we have.
(How many people do we need?) Amoeba theory…
(Activist?) Depends on what you mean by activist. I don’t generally go around telling people what they should do. And I’m not fundamentalist in that I do everything right always myself. I try to make the big things right and recognise that sometimes you need to make compromises.
(Challenges?) Run Green Charge to fruition. Develop the road map, develop a big systems model to look for transition points.
(Miracle?) We have the technology…so one, a sudden global awareness that we need to change to become sustainable, and two, this is how we should do it.
(Advice?) Don’t despair. Most of us are aware that there is something wrong with the world today, but most of us are also quite frustrated that we don’t know what to do to fix it. But there are many things you can do, use the internet, find things to do, trying to reduce your own energy bill for example will start helping the world.
Merlina Missimer is a researcher in the department of Strategic Sustainable Development at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden. She is exploring the social side of the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development.
Talking points
What does the world need from us to make sustainability happen?
We need to find a way out, and depression is not the most helpful thing we can teach
Rather than convincing people of what’s right, we create positive examples of what’s possible in a sustainable world.
Considering sustainability with a systems lens to make sure we don’t address one thing but create negative consequences somewhere else…this has been clearly done on an ecological basis, but for social we had gone straight to the individual…what would it look like if we took a systems perspective to the social side?
People are not subject to systematic barrier to integrity (physical wellness), influence (the individual is able to influence the system), competence (ability to learn), impartiality (being treated equally), meaning (clear purpose).
Systematic barriers are ingrained in how we designed the system
Sustainability principles create a space for people to meet their needs
Asking bigger and better questions. Does this product even exist in a sustainable society? Those are the kinds of questions we need people to ask.
We don’t necessarily have to have the answers, but the more people we have to ask questions in that way, the better we will be going in the direction of a sustainable society. If we don’t ask those questions, we’ll never get there.
It’s the giant systems that we currently have for production that are really hard to change
Aha moment…there’s a framework, an intellectual structure around of these things that are interrelated. Without that structure we’d be going crazy because there’s just too many things to think about.
(Activist?) I don’t consider myself any of the labels. I’m actively working. Would I choose academia if I thought it was imperative to take a neutral stance? No.
(Miracle?) People woken to face the fact that we have somehow managed to build systems that are not only inherently unsustainable, but don’t actually achieve what we want to achieve – and equipped with a desire to do something about it.
(Advice?) If you haven’t started asking yourself what we’re doing, then start asking.
This conversation is one of a series of four recorded at Blekinge Institute of Technology Department of Strategic Sustainable Development in September 2014.
You would be very unlikely to win a game of chess without knowing the principled definition of checkmate. Reaching a sustainable society without any idea of the principles that define that situation would also be very unlikely.
Prof Göran Broman heads the Department of Strategic Sustainable Development at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden.
This conversation is one of a series of four recorded at Blekinge Institute of Technology Department of Strategic Sustainable Development in September 2014.
Talking points
Developing tools to support strategic sustainable thinking
It is important that we develop tools with the community, the type of people who will be using them or they will be useless.
How organisations can support the whole of society towards sustainability, and how can they do that in a way that strengthens their own organisation – that is the being strategic.
If an organisation does something for sustainability of society, that is good, but if the company goes bankrupt doing that then it’s not that good because they can’t continue to contribute, and they become a bad example…then other companies will be hesitant to work proactively with sustainability and that will slow down the progress of society towards sustainability.
It is really important that organisations that work towards sustainability are successful in the short term, because that will help the transition.
Strategic sustainability is about developing methodologies to help organisations bring together those seemingly hard to match aspects – the short term with the long term, the small scale perspective with the big perspective, the self interest profitability with ethics, and so on.
A framework for strategic sustainability, tools supporting the whole of society in a way that strengthens your own organisation.
Having a long term perspective, a vision of where you want to far into the future when the whole of society is sustainable, how is your organisation supporting that, fulfilling the needs or the wants of the customers within the frame of a sustainable society in the future. From that, look back to today’s situation, how does that differ? What are you doing today that contributes to unsustainability?
Once the companies have created that vision, we put that vision inside the frame of the definition of sustainability – because is is really stupid to have a vision that cannot exist in the future.
In what way is the company today contributing to sustainability and unsustainability.
It is possible to avoid the apparent contribution of short term profitability and long term societal sustainability.
It is difficult to describe a product, a person, a company today is sustainable since the whole of society is unsustainable, or on an unsustainable track, whatever you do contributes to that unsustainability. But you can say that a product can be designed, or a company can be run in a way that contributes to sustainability – contributes to the transition from today’s unsustainable situation to the sustainable situation, that you can say.
Only when we have reached the situation when the whole of society is sustainable, and everything within it…then you can say a company or product is sustainable, but today you can not. We are unfortunately very far from that situation.
It’s impossible, or at least very hard, and not very wise, to define in detail what a sustainable society should look like. We won’t get everyone to agree on detail…another reason is that so many things will change during the transition that we cannot predict… So we have been trying to find a principled definition of sustainability.
The principled definition of strategic sustainability can be described using a chess metaphor. In chess you also have a principled definition of the goal, how do you define success – you put your opponent in checkmate. Checkmate is not defined in a detailed way…it is a principled definition – it says that the king must be threatened, the king must not be able to move away from the threat, you should not be able to put a piece in front of the king to protect him and you should not be able to strike out the threat. If those principles are fulfilled then it’s checkmate. It can look in an almost infinite number of ways…when you start to play a game of chess you don’t know exactly how it will end. That definition is used all the time by the chess player…first you learn the basic rules and how to play the game (the A step)…then he or she assesses the current situation, where are my pieces, my opponents pieces and so on (the B step), then work up a number of ways you can move ahead (the C step) and there are huge amount of possibilities, and the (D step) what smart early moves should I start with? And you assess those moves through the lens of the definition of checkmate because that’s what you want to reach. Once you’ve made a couple of moves you reassess the situation, because the opponent has moved his or her pieces in a way you could not predict in detail. You move and reassess. All the time the player has the definition of checkmate.
You would be very unlikely to win a game of chess without knowing the principled definition of checkmate. Reaching a sustainable society without any idea of the principles that define that situation would also be very unlikely.
We are defining and continually refining strategic sustainability principles that correspond to checkmate.
Our principles are based on defining an ecological and socially sustainable society…people ask why not economics? …but that is not included in the goal, because economics is not the goal – it is means for reaching the goal.
We have a systematic increase of fossil carbon, captured in carbon dioxide, that is increasing. That cannot continue, we cannot have higher and higher concentrations all the time, because eventually we will reach a tipping point, or critical limit where the system will collapse. We don’t know exactly where that limit is, but we don’t need to know exactly.
If we run the society the way that we will have as an unavoidable outcome a systematic increase of substances, then it is unsustainable. We don’t have to know exactly when it collapses, but it will, and the design as such is unsustainable.
Of course it is of value to try to find out the critical limits of substances, but it is also hard, so we should not put all of our efforts in society, in research to find where exactly where those critical limits are, it’s hard and we’ll never succeed…when we know that if society is designed in such a way that will result in us approaching those limits, it’s unsustainable.
In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to increases in systematic degradation by physical means – mismanagement of land, capacity of ecosystem….
We are currently working on elaborating the social dimension.
(chess metaphor, not overlord) importance of self benefit of companies…society is on a non-sustainable route…it is becoming more and more difficult for companies to do things that continue to contribute to unsustainability.
We need to change the system we have from within, we have no other option. People that have realised where we need to be on a principled level need to strike that balance, by moving ahead as fast as fast as possible, not faster or slower. This being strategic and is not easy. It’s not easy to play chess just because you know the definition of checkmate.
(But do we know the know the rules of sustainability?) We know some rules, we know the scientific laws for example, they apply regardless of politics. Then there are rules that might change – politically decided laws and regulations might change during the process. So we have a mix of rules.
(can we see the whole board? some things are unseeable, there are things we don’t understand and won’t understand) We can see the whole board depending on resolution, in a very concrete term the first astronauts saw the earth from outside. Then at a more refined level of resolution, a single organisation might not see it everyday, but they can relate to that full picture.
All the things I have done in sustainability come from childhood. When I was kid, my parents were engaged in sustainability. Especially my father, he was chairman of a local environmental association.
I chose…engineering so I could design a problem out of a system.
We see sustainability as a design problem. Society is designed in a way that is not sustainable, and operated on a basic level that is not sustainable.
I decided to go for engineering as my formal education…I thought it would be easier to change the system if I had that credibility.
(Activist?) Yes. I act to create change.
(Challenges) Huge challenge in academia of compartmentalisation. People doing research and people doing academic education are divided into disciplines – which is not bad in itself and we need more and more detailed knowledge in specific fields – but not if we do that instead, or only. If we don’t have some people doing a structured overview. How can you bring together all that wonderful knowledge?
How can you combine all that knowledge in the best way relation to the sustainability challenge that we have? That is, by nature, interdisciplinary academic research. That is problematic, because when academic groups are evaluated, they are evaluated from the disciplinary point of view. It is hard for interdisciplinary groups to get fair evaluations.
(Miracle) One of the first things would be to have every person in the world be knowledgeable about how to reach strategic sustainability.
We have the physical resources, we have energy coming from the sun that would be sufficient to keep all of humanity in very good living standards, if we do it in the right way we have enough food, and so on…so it’s about managing this in a sustainable way, and that takes knowledge and competence.
(Advice) Try learn about those things and try to do what you can. Many people think “this is so daunting, so huge, so what I do as a little person is meaningless if I do something the system is so big and unsustainable it will collapse anyhow” but it’s not, try to do what you can. If every person does what he or she can, then we are a good part of the way.
Don’t be scared off, do what you can do. If every person does what he or she can do, then we will move our position forward, and then it will be apparent to those people that we can change things.
We want to promote dialogue amongst scientists and engineers, particularly in areas where they don’t want to talk about things
Dr Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility.
Talking points
Our aim is to promote science, design and technology in contributing to peace, social justice and sustainability
Encourage scientists and engineers to think differently
To think differently about their role in society, prioritising environmental issues and social justice rather than a narrow economic focus
The challenge is an agenda of security through an arms industry – we argue for science and technology not based on yet another generation of highly destructive technologies
We want to promote dialogue amongst scientists and engineers, particularly in areas where they don’t want to talk about things
There’s an acceptance of the arms industry – “it keeps us safe” – we want to question that.
We try and fill gaps, ask the awkward questions.
Not just responding to problems with a technofix – another technology.
Part of the concern is that technology is often grabbed as a simple answer and it turns out not to be – it might deal with one problem but create another.
Trying to get around the techofix mentality
The term activist is so often used as a pejorative. If it’s about about questions, proposing different solutions to mainstream, challenging systems and offering something constructive, then it’s an activist organisation.
Working in the arms industry made me ask awkward questions, ones I hadn’t faced before – severely questioning what I was doing.
One of the challenges of the environment is ‘oh we don’t need to worry about that because it is too uncertain’ but on the other hand, we’re willing to believe economists, where the uncertainties are orders of magnitude bigger than the environmental ones.
We’re willing to take at face value economic models…despite being hugely unreliable and based on so many assumptions you can make them prove whatever you want according to your political viewpoint.
We’ve developed an economic system that’s not very stable (or fair or sustainable) so takes a lot of tuning – our news has become fixated on this.
(why sticking to growth narrative) because we haven’t come up with an alternative economic model that works in the way we’ve become used to.
SGR has ethical principles rather than specific polices on every subject. We encourage debate and discussion to apply principles.
(On demilitarisation) moving towards a society that solves its conflicts through dialogue and building trust and diplomacy rather than trying to build new generations of weapons
We need a to follow cautionary principle, rather than doing things just because we can
Some scientists can create a new technology, and other scientists can ask awkward questions about that technology – like what’s the impact, social implications and will it improve quality of life.
We’re being driven along by an economic imperative, not considering broader pros and cons.
We’re breaching environmental limits, some clearly, others either we don’t know or we will breach them in few decades – and that’s really scary.
We need to change norms of international behaviour that says nuclear weapons are unacceptable for anybody to have.
Challenge the assumption that there is a technofix. Technology is just one group of approaches, we need scientists and engineers to know that there are other groups of approaches
Codes of ethics (in professional bodies) are very narrow. Our organisation’s name is Global Responsibility – derived from social responsibility, corporate, environmental responsibility.
Ethics so often in professional institutions is interpreted very narrowly – professional ethics of do you job well, don’t lie, don’t plagiarise, don’t make something that’s going to blow up as soon as you’ve sold it. We think that’s far too narrow, you’ve got to think about your role in society, your place in society as an engineer, as your company, as your profession – and think are we doing the right thing?
Activist: Yes. For same reasons the organisation can be considered activist
Making things unacceptable is a very powerful idea. At the moment nuclear weapons aren’t something to be ashamed of for a lot of countries – chemical weapons are, biological weapons are – that shame that comes with breaching international law that’s built up over a couple of hundred years – its more powerful than people realise.
(What do we need to do to preload students with awkward questions?) We want to inspire students with science, give them at least sight and experience of something else.
The science and technology that is presented as exciting, especially for boys, is things like explosions, fighter planes and warships…we’re trying to present an alternative to that, still desirable, kind of nicer, this is what society is about, helping each other and using technologies that help us to help each other. And this is how is how you can live a good life – not being dazzled by the flashing lights and loud noises of the problematic technologies.
Being affected enough to make a different choice in their lives.
Note:
This conversation was recorded in the Common House at Lancaster Cohousing (see earlier conversation with Cathy and Alison).
 I thought the solution should be something to inspire the generation that are coming after us.
Patrik Larrson is creator of GaSuCo “Gaming in Sustainability through Communication”. We talk about his motivations and the role of discussion in sustainability. This conversation was recorded after we talked after we played the game with Elina Eriksson and Daniel Pargman‘s Masters course in Sustainable Media Technology at KTH in Stockholm (flickr set).
Talking points
The game focuses on interaction between players
Not only do you get to talk about the things you feel are important, you also get to listen to other people’s thoughts on the same subject
I was challenged (in my Masters) to think what is the next big thing? I thought the solution shouldn’t be to invent something for the future, I thought the solution should be something to inspire the generation that are coming after us.
Interaction and discussion is a much better way of sharing knowledge than just looking something up.
The questions are designed for discussion…both viewpoints are correct..there are no right or wrong answers.
The questions are designed to be tough and hard and difficult, but however you approach a subject it is still correct.
Your lack of knowledge might be someone else’s chance to talk about a subject, what they feel is important about that subject…then next time you can relate to what that other student said
You bring other peoples’ knowledge with you – to create your own base of knowledge.
The questions are written in a way that they are supposed to be challenging. Â It’s no fun if you always know what the answer is.
If you always know the answer, you don’t progress, you don’t get challenged in your way of thinking.
When discussing things with no actual answers you get all different kinds of viewpoints.
You don’t have to agree, you just have to talk about it.  In the process of talking you get to hear so many different kinds of unexpected  (and expected) aspects of subjects that are so important but too easily forgotten
There’s a discussion question “Is it OK to buy second hand Christmas gifts?” and this can be followed in the discussion with “…and do you?”. Â There is a difference between acting and saying, we also highlight that,. it is easy to have a viewpoint of the correct thing, but when you discuss it these differences become clear.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but you have to motivate your answer. Â You have to be able to stand up for what you think. Â As long as you can do that, you’re entitled to whatever opinion you want. Â I’m not here to change anybody to think what I think, I just want to engage people in talking about it.
I cannot force someone to think what I think. Â But this is a way of helping them discuss it, and understanding themselves that we cannot continue business as usual.
Wealth is not only based on economic growth
The main thing is that people play the game and understand that there are different ways of looking at how we are living, and talk about it.
People have this feeling that someone, somewhere is going to make a change.   That itself has to change.
Motivation: understanding that we are all different but cannot continue what we’ve been doing, this is my way of contributing to that change.
Activist: I’m just a regular guy trying to make education more fun.
Challenges: High school, and then try for a computer version without losing the core of interaction.
Even in a future of scarcity, we still need technology, we just have to design it very differently.
Dr Elina Eriksson is interested in issues of usablity and user-centred design to promote change; both organizational change and change in individual behaviour.
Elina has multiple affiliations at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She is in the School of Computer Science and Communication (CSC), the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design (MID) and in research groups Green Leap and the Centre for Sustainable Communications (CESC).
Talking points
I realised quite early on that I don’t only want to work in computer science in programming, but I also want to get close to people and change stuff – so Human Computer Interaction became my major.
There is definitely a gender issue in how computer science portrays itself.
The Brundtland definition is talked about but it’s not really operationable.
The environmental aspects to sustainability are clearly important, with climate change, but I also feel very strongly for the social side of sustainability.
Circles within circles, we have to live within the bound of our earth.
Sometimes I think we are not good enough at reflecting on what we are doing and why. We can get so enthusiastic about new technology that we don’t really look back at what we are doing.
To create smart sustainable cities we need a bottom up view – what practices are making a difference and how can we help these practices through infrastructure?
Sustainability needs us to work on several different levels at the same time. Both at the policy legislation levels, and to change social norms – the culture.
For HCI this means a focus on norm-critical design. Technology can help people reflect more on their own practices.
HCI has such a suite of methods for helping improve work practices, now is the time to scale that up to the community – to smart cities.
Students report a cognitive dissonance, on one hand they are taught to develop new cool Apps, and on the other we come with our Sustainability course and tell them that this might not be the best way of working.
We focus on predicaments rather than problems. Problems are things we can solve, whereas predicament might be situations that are not solvable.
You have to find ways to work with a predicament, but there might not be one single solution.
We think it is important to be honest with students, that we are standing on the brink.
We try to find a balance between facts and values.
We can’t require them to have a particular value, but we can show…that as soon as we talk about the future, it is no longer a fact based science, it’s about values – what kind of future would we like to have.
ICT is interwoven with everything we do today in society, how much ICT is involved in efficiency, how much our norms and beliefs and culture is based on what we meet in the media
We play a discussion based board game – Gaming in Sustainability through Communication.
(Challenge) integrate sustainability into programme.
As long as the main goal of our education is forcing our students to work in an unsustainable manner, we will never reach a sustainable future.
How can we reach a sustainable future if we still have a consumer society?
Technology is a problem, but it can also solve things, dematerialise and make processes more efficient.
The fundamental problem of working with sustainability – it’s such a big system to change.
Related
Daniel Pargman
The extravagant users…if they are getting the same utility as the lowest users – having the same sorts of experiences, then why do they need all these things?
Oliver Bates is a PhD candidate at the Lancaster University School of Computing and Communications. Oliver’s research focuses on understanding energy impacts in the home for which he uses using a mixed method involving lots of sensors and lots of talking and listening. He presented a paper on this work at CHI 2014 called “Towards an holistic view of the energy and environmental impacts of domestic media and IT“.
Talking points:
(why in computing?) I enjoy learning new things and the idea that I’m helping somebody else
Ecofeedback is not particularly successful in reducing energy consumption – somewhere around 5 and 15%.
What are people doing and how can we do it differently?
People design new things and people buy the new things and people use the new things, it’s a self fulfilling energy growth.
I like the thought of undesigning technology
Poeple don’t think about the energy they just want to get on with doing what they do
Because you can watch video on demand, you do…
How devices are being used in every day life
It’s hard to relate to what seems like an arbitrary number
The differences in what people do can be subtle but have huge differences in impact
the more devices you own, the larger the impacts…larger more complex arrangements of devices had twice the embodied impact
Bigger things and more things use more power
Devices physically connected together: constellations
Constellations of devices increase the impact for a given activity
If you own a phone for a year the embodied dwarfs the amount of direct energy
If you charge a phone for two hours at 6 watts, that’s nothing compared to a laptop at 50-60W for 8 hours.
Longevity, across anything is more important, especially for high impact devices.
If a thing has high embodied impacts and it has a higher electricity demand, at what point do I go, ‘this devices uses way too much electricity and I’ve had it for a while, I should buy a more efficient thing, but therefore releasing more carbon’?
(Finding the sweetspot) calculate the embodied emissions, whichever method you want, you need to then know the times of use – say a laptop you charge 8 hours a day, using 50W across those hours…for me I want the direct energy to at least be greater than the embodied impacts. I don’t want something to be created before I’ve matched its emissions – that feels like a waste, I don’t know why. Double the impact maybe, getting your impact’s worth.
The numbers on the life cycle impact vary hugely according to the method (cost, weight etc) and how deep you go in the analysis.
If I say “I can reduce my impact by replacing all my media and IT devices with new ones that are 15% more efficient” then that is a completely misinformed decision…you’ve bought a whole new thing creating 1000s of kilograms of CO2 in the atmosphere just because you can save 15% per month in your energy bill – that is a bad decision.
I don’t think there are obvious rules of thumb. That’s part of the problem with ecofeedback, it’s not like a blanket rule you can apply.
People that owned more stuff used more stuff…a difference of 12 lightbulbs to 2 lightbulbs
People make choices…the smallest user was 164Wh, the largest 4135Wh…about 40 times more impact for pretty much the same experience.
The two largest two consumers used 40% of the total consumption, which is huge and they did have large inventories, but in the middle the variation comes down to times of use and not leaving stuff on.
(the bang for the buck comes from addressing the top users). But needs context.
Consumption was a product of how they configured their things.
Constellations amplify electricity use.
If these people can it it this low impact way and be happy, then how do we get that message to the high impact users, especially if they don’t care? I don’t want to be the guy the guy that says “you need to throw out all your stuff”. Extreme policy but may be we need to be extreme sometimes, if we are trying to get from 15% to 65% energy efficiency then maybe that’s the radical steps we need to push for.
Activist: No, I’m too comfortable
Challenges: Domestic demand on cloud services. Lifetime impacts. Motivations
Advice: Discuss how you do things at home…acknowledge that (other people) get on just fine by having a ‘lesser’ quality of experience, but it’s OK…maybe we can share. I like the idea of sharing but I also like the idea of my own space and my own stuff.
Resources
Human power station
Rocket science is simple compared to the complex systems that involve modelling people and the environment.
Dr Henk Roodt knows about the development of technology. And about making that real. A Scientist/Engineer with 25+ years experience in high technology environments, he is currently Research Programmes Manager at Waikato Institute of Technology. We asked Henk to talk about his background (it’s rocket science), whether 3D printing will really change the world, and innovation processes as applied to Green-Tech. Henk is associated with Audacious – Dunedin’s student business incubator, where he is Entrepreneur in Residence.
Talking points:
It’s only when it is really big, and audacious that you go for it. Big things in the history of science were driven by real world problems.
Need to model the environment and the people at the same time. Not the physical model then slap in the people as an add-on. Start with people, the complexity of the people and their culture.
So how do you pitch the right level of modelling? (for complex problems such as hunger in Africa)…one of the things I’ve discovered is that doing mathematical models at that level is stupid. non-quantitative models, morphologies that show how things fit together, that opens up the discussion rather than bringing it into a fixed framework. A model like that gives you an instant picture at a moment in time. This sets the scene for the next level, and the next, the whole model is a work in progress.
Modelling systems is not like modelling airflow over the wing of an aircraft – sure that’s super-mathematics…but to model complex systems and people you often only need a piece of paper and a computer to help you look at all the options.
You have to make certain choices, and that comes down to ‘what are those guiding principles you have in your life that you are willing to live by?’. You have to set those up in your mind and listen carefully to that voice.
Opening up a social good category in Audacious meant they could put their emotions and their hearts into their businesses. They are mixing the social responsibility and the business – this is the edge that will deliver the social good.
I ask myself: can I change things by applying my skills?
Shane’s number of the week: 2.07°C is how much hotter the >Australian Spring was above average, producing the warmest spring on record.
Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam is working up a survey into the values and educational expectations of incoming IT students.
Henk described Ken Erwin’s book Communicating the New.
I’m only interested in things that drive structural change – that’s what motivates me.
Nick Gerristen describes himself as a “catalyst and social entrepreneurâ€. He is a lawyer with a significant portfolio in green-technology:
Talking points
We’ve lost sight of the inputs and outputs that make community operate.
It was a surprise to me that people could be in business not wanting to do good.
You make decisions, they may prove to be wrong but they provide a framework for learning.
There is no magic out there, you just do the best you can do.
There are smart markets and dumb markets.
Anything we can do to substitute fuel has a multiplier effect as we can keep capital on-shore, in addition to climate effects.
We are a mining company but we are operating above the ground – making coal without having to dig holes.
NZ is selective about the good news stories we’re prepared to back.
Great opportunity for NZ is  to repopulate small places – this is NZ’s future rather than super cities.
Craft will get a boost as retail collapses.
Accept some things will trend to ubiquity. Â And first rule in business is not to be in that space. Everything not in that space will have special value.
Embrace constraint. Â Appreciate benefits and limitations.
I’m worried but also an optimist.
A simple step that I take may have the potential to trigger a super recovery scenario.
Community develops strength and capability to look after itself – that’s what resilience is.
200 years later, we’re learning that industrial revolution is a model that isn’t working.
Sustainability comes from embracing constraint, looking at inputs and outputs and enabling people to make real decisions for communities that they are part of.
Am I an activist?
If it is being silly enough to have an idea and to be able to dedicate a part of your life to it, and be responsible for it, and back yourself on it, then yes. Â All I’m trying to do is do the best that I can with the resources of time and energy that I have. Â It’s exciting, stressful and enlightening all at once.
Society is putting a lot of pressure on the next generation without clear identification of the doorways and opportunities for them to work through.
It’s not about money, it’s about creating a dimension of change.
On how to get more entrepreneurs:
We need more artists – people prepared to try and  test ideas with different materials and create some sort of  harmony that someone like and  might buy, that’s a direct metaphor for developing  technology, and new businesses.
Go out and try stuff.  If you don’t know what you’re doing – absolutely embrace it.  I’m an expert at not knowing what I’m doing.  If you are interested and excited about something then you will learn it.
