In “Make This Earth Day Your Last” over at WorldChanging, Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich forced me to struggle with my current attitudes about sustainability and systems change. I thought I would blog my process.
In summary: Gestures are not enough. What is required is a transformation of consciousness, and a united understanding of our interconnection. Given this context, I can regularly ask myself whether our work is changing systems, or whether it is simply green jewelry, adorning the surface of the university.
Analysis and Application
Alex and Sarah argue that we need to demonstrate a bright green future that is so enticing, everyone will want to live that way. They also propose that environmentalism has been reduced to “the myth of individual lifestyle responsibility,” and that what most needs to be changed are the systems we live in. They propose three spaces for change that will transform systems.
- Information: Transparency empowers. Visitors and staff should be able to glance at a dashboard and see how well my organization is performing re: carbon emissions, footprint, etc. In campus buildings, signage is one way to give backstory; so are well-annotated flickrsets. Flatscreens around campus can broadcast source information, backstories, resource use.
- “Stronger connections:” Allies are out there, potentially many. They need to see a bright green future. Something so enticing, so sane, they’d ask what they can do to help. As the university begins to network, are we enticing people to be part of a bright green now? Not just enticing them to change individual habits, but enticing them to place sustainability at the center of their institutions and systems? How would that wish inform our website? How would that wish inform our interactions? How many of our partners want this, and how many aren’t sold on the idea?
- New ways of thinking/bright green economies as drivers: Can our sustainability laboratory benefit the rest of the world? Or are we only sensible in a university settings? This point seems to focus on Global South. If we are innovating solutions, who do we imagine will replicate them, and what are we doing to support/drive that replication?
Reading this article has pushed me to regularly evaluate whether my work is transforming the university I work at. But I also wonder if that’s enough. If I’m carbon neutral, and the university is carbon neutral, but urban infrastructure and wider food systems are not… did I accomplish anything? Living under the Myth of Individual Lifestyle Responsibility, I didn’t have to worry about this. It’s harder to imagine systems-level change. I don’t know what success would like. (Except, you know, surviving.) I guess while I work at individual and institutional change, I also need to be networking with standards-making bodies… what else?
I’ve also been wrestling with how to synch this with my primary identity as a Baha’i. The disunity between those causing climate change and those affected by it goes to the core of the Baha’i Writings. The article states clearly that “climate change…kills 150,000 people a year.” In this light, “one-world living” begins to mean both reducing resource usage and recognizing that we are fundamentally united. During our pilgrimage to the Baha’i World Center, Negin and I heard a talk highlighting the disunity inherent in the terms “developing” and “developed” worlds. We’re one world. If part of the world is developing, then we’re all in that boat together.
Questions
- How can we give incentives for placing sustainability at the core of our institutions?
- How many CEOs are placing sustainability at the core of their organizations?
- How many standards-making bodies are considering sustainability in their work?
- What does systems-level change look like? Do we have examples?
“The process of disintegration must inexorably continue, and its corrosive influence must penetrate deeper and deeper into the very core of a crumbling age. Much suffering will still be required ere the contending nations, creeds, classes and races of mankind are fused in the crucible of universal affliction, and are forged by the fires of a fierce ordeal into one organic commonwealth, one vast, unified, and harmoniously functioning system.”
“And yet while the shadows are continually deepening, might we not claim that gleams of hope, flashing intermittently on the international horizon, appear at times to relieve the darkness that encircles humanity? Would it be untrue to maintain that in a world of unsettled faith and disturbed thought, a world of steadily mounting armaments, of unquenchable hatreds and rivalries, the progress, however fitful, of the forces working in harmony with the spirit of the age can already be discerned?”
(Shoghi Effend, World Order of Baha’u'llah, p.191-193)
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Alex points to one example of systems-level change vis. environmental impact in his recent “My Other Car is a Bright Green City.” The basic argument seems to be, “Making cars more efficient is great, but building cities that require less driving will have an impact of much greater magnitude, and is achievable right now.”
“If we spend the next 20 years developing compact neighborhoods with green buildings and smart infrastructure, we can reduce the ecological impacts of American prosperity by jumps that are now somewhat hard to imagine.” (Alex Steffen, WorldChanging)
In some way this reminds me of a lesson I learned about apologizing. When you say, “I’m sorry,” is it because you don’t want to carry the burden of having done something wrong to someone else, or is it because you are sincerely grieved that the other person has suffered? It is a subtle but important distinction – because where the focus of the apology is makes a great deal of difference in the resulting behavior. Similarly when considering racism and privilege, do guilt-experiencing parties feel distress because they don’t want to be racist, or because someone is being harmed by racism? The first implies a focus on the self, an individuals-as-racists view of the world; the second will lead to a more systems-focused view that addresses the injustice, and prioritizes the party who is harmed, rather than simply serving to salve one’s guilty conscience without changing behavior.
The difference between a focus on the individual and a focus on the system…this was the point of similarity I’m trying to express, in the context of the environmental issues you raise, beloved.
The individual is a vital part of the whole system – just as we are all drops of one ocean. But just as the ocean, as a coherent whole, displays phenomena that a grouping of individual droplets would not, so the environmental effects of our institutions/structures are unlike those at our personal droplet levels.
What to do next? Everything.
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[...] between individual and social transformation and a post from almost two years ago, “WorldChanging and the End of Earth Day.” In that older post, we examined WorldChanging’s concept of “the myth of [...]