Chasing sustainability has become a fool's errand

The following text is from a lecture that Ian Gill gave to the UBC Sauder School of Business' "Chasing Sustainability Conference" on March 12, 2009, in Vancouver.

March 13, 2009

"Sustainability has become a largely meaningless idea," Ecotrust Canada President Ian Gill tells a UBC Sauder School of Business conference, "and chasing it has become a fool’s errand." Given recent catastrophic events, we should reframe the debate around resilience.

According to Wikipedia, “sustainability has become a complex term that can be applied to almost every facet of life on Earth” – which is a problem. It has mostly lost its meaning.

Twenty years ago, in 1989, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

I think a more useful framework to use is a definition of resilience.

Like sustainability, there are lots of those, but the one I like most is one that Thomas Homer-Dixon used at a conference in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. He said:

Resilience is the capability to withstand shock without catastrophic failure.
That’s something that seems rather more pertinent to our times than “sustainability.”

With all due respect to our conference sponsors, I would suggest that the world has been “chasing sustainability” for 20 years at least, since the Brundtland Commission, and in some cases long before that – and we have mostly been chasing our tails. Sustainability has become a largely meaningless idea, and chasing it has become a fool’s errand.

Instead, I would argue that like it or not, we are now challenged with discovering resilience. Where are we going to find, or rediscover, the capability to withstand shock without catastrophic failure? Rediscover, because I would submit that First Nations communities that have weathered the shocks of the past 150 years can teach us a great deal about resilience.

So, where are we going to find the capacity for resilience? Other than in First Nations, I’m not actually sure where to look but I know where not to look: on Wall Street, Bay Street, or Howe Street. In Washington, in Ottawa, in Victoria. The fact is that the world is undergoing a spectacular system failure right now, because we became so enthralled by a system, an economy, that was ever more distant from the natural economy – that we overshot.

On almost every measure we can muster, we have overshot. Consumption. Debt. Resource extraction. Debt. Population. Debt. Pollution. Debt. Sprawl. Debt. Emissions. Debt. Bailouts. Debt. Debt. Debt.

I believe we are now in a sort of global debtor’s prison. Nature didn’t put us there. We did. Governments did. Corporations did. Hundreds of thousands of people in North America alone have lost their jobs in the first quarter of 2009. Why? Is the world, is the Earth, is Nature really physically that much different than in was in the first quarter of 2008? Is there that much less soil to be tilled or oil to be spilled? Of course not.

The natural system hasn’t changed much in the past year – but the social systems have. We’ve stopped believing in one of our own creations – the economy.

So, if we have lost faith in the casino economy, let’s use our human ingenuity to build a conservation economy. This is the underlying idea of Ecotrust. We believe in information democracy, the democratization of credit, creating jobs and protecting the environment, new triple-bottom line financial institutions like Chicago’s Shorebank and our own Ecotrust Canada Capital, which has lent $12 million and leveraged another $38 million for BC businesses. We are looking at new ways of valuing ecosystems beyond cutting trees. How do we monetize the natural economy in a way that recognizes complexity, and doesn’t reduce it to simplistic commodities?

Let me return to the theme of debt for a moment. Debt is not all bad.

A confession. I’m a kind of wannabe-banker. I get to hang out with them sometimes. We have partnered with Shorebank whose mission is social advancement in marginalized inner city neighbourhoods. I’m also a director on the board of Vancity. We specialize in debt. But not debt at any cost.

Vancity is a credit union. A cooperative. Here’s what consumer advocate Ralph Nader recently had to say about credit unions in the United States:

While the reckless giant banks are shattering like an over-heated glacier day by day, the nation's credit unions are a relative island of calm largely apart from the vortex of casino capitalism.

Eighty five million Americans belong to credit unions which are not-for-profit cooperatives owned by their members who are depositors and borrowers. Your neighborhood or workplace credit union did not invest in these notorious speculative derivatives nor did they offer people "teaser rates" to sign on for a home mortgage they could not afford. Credit Unions have no shareholders nor stock nor stock options; they are responsible to their owner-members who are their customers. According to Mike Schenk, an economist with the Credit Union National Association, credit unions are ‘portfolio lenders. That means they hold in their portfolios most of the loans they originate instead of selling them to investors, so they care about the financial performance of those loans.’

The cooperative model, whether in finance, food, housing or any other sector of the economy, does best when the owner-cooperators are active in the general operations and directions of their co-op.

There are very contemporary lessons to be learned from the successes of the credit union model such as being responsive to consumer loan needs and down to earth with their portfolios. Yet in all the massive media coverage of the Wall Street barons and their lethal financial escapades, crimes and frauds, little is being written about how the regulation, philosophy and behavior of the credit unions largely escaped this catastrophe.

So we can learn from alternative economic models like credit unions and cooperatives. But we also need to learn from the past. From Aboriginal communities, in terms of resilience. And, from our mistakes.

Ronald Wright is the author of A Short History of Progress. He points out that while we are descendants of apes, in the past three million years we have been shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. And that’s not such a good thing:

We have become experimental creatures of our own making. This experiment has never been tried before. And we, its unwitting authors, have never controlled it. The experiment is now moving very quickly and on a colossal scale. Since the early 1900s, the world’s population has multiplied by four and its economy – a rough measure of the human load on nature – by more than forty. We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control … it is entirely up to us. If we fail – if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us – nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting the apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.

Consider the words of George Monbiot in The Guardian:

“Without radical action, we will be the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?”

Or finally, the words of that other guy, Ian Gill:

“Without radical action, will we – will you – be the generation that chased sustainability, and yet threw away the key to the debtor’s prison that you inherited, because with all your education and ingenuity, it’s a prison you never figured out how to escape from?”

Source is from www.ecotrust.ca/chasingsustainability

Resilient Community Economics

It is very interesting to notice the shift in the news about the economic crisis and climate change. More and more, people are talking about finding ways of adapting to all the changes already happening, instead of talking about preventing these crises, or preventing and fixing them with pipe dream repairs.

This tells me that we are finally accepting that many of our current systems are vulnerable and are failing, that we cannot continue living the same way, that we need to change.

Of course, there are still many people that keep on ignoring this reality and prefer the illusion that everything is all right. Eventually, those people will have to face reality and they may suffer much more, because they will be ill-prepared for it.

The idea of adapting ourselves, our cities, our communities for these imminent changes is nothing else but building our resilience.

Home-grown or community economics provides alternatives to help with building local resilience in small communities. For instance:

1. Local bartering and local currencies. This is not a new idea. Many cities in Switzerland, USA, Britain, Argentina, Brazil have their own local currencies, accepted by banks and businesses. Even in Canada, there are a few examples in BC. Actually, the now famous LETS, Local Employment Trading System, was first developed in the Comox Valley by Michael Linton in early 1983. He designed a simple accounting system whereby account holders could purchase goods and services, in whole or in part, by transferring accounting points from their account into that of the seller. Linton labelled the accounting points "green dollars" after his vision of the environmental and social benefits that would follow general use of the system. More than 3,000 communities around the world are now using LETS.

2. Co-ops. All sort of co-ops have been working with tremendous success for many years around the world and they are now becoming popular at a local level. From car co-ops to food co-ops and farmer markets to housing and more.

3. Micro-financing. People-to-people lending and microfinance projects are booming in many countries. For instance, Women's World Banking, Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, now emulated in many countries, FINCA and ACCION in Latin America. Credit unions in Canada are becoming more proactive by helping poor people, lending to small businesses and social enterprises which meet social needs while making modest profits.

4. Time-banking. Time banking, a brainchild of Edgar Cahn in the USA is now helping local people connect and share services in Japan, Europe and other countries. Economist Hazel Henderson says: “Neighbours contact each other via a local "time banker" to provide meals and help for shut-ins, baby-sit each other's children, watch over property, mow lawns and share appliances. Car-sharing has now spawned many new companies such as Zip Car in the USA and others in Canada and Europe where people can make ride arrangements rapidly on Blackberrys and laptops.”

The majority of these community economics alternatives are not based on a monetary system. The most important goal is to bypass the greedy banking system and find ways to become resilient by ourselves. Henderson again: “In rural areas in Florida, radio stations have call-in programs where farmers can say ‘I have spare time on my tractor to exchange for fertilizer or pepper, melon, eggplant seeds. The farmer gives her phone number and the trades are exchanged off-line.”

The most important thing about the above alternatives is that they are already working in many places. They are not pipe dream fixes, nor they are depending on governments to lead the way. They are community-based solutions; it is confirmed they work, and yes, they will help in building our community resilience.


Next time: building resilience to climate change!

What a Resilient World Might Look Like

I am afraid we don’t have a good understanding of what a resilient world would look. We talk about the need to slow economic growth, to recognize natural limits, to re-localize ourselves, to reduce our overall consumerism and more, in order to be resilient, to be sustainable. But overall, it is difficult to picture a resilient world.

Brian Walker, author of “Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World“, offers the following visions or values for what a resilient world might look like:

1. DIVERSITY. A resilient world would promote biological, landscape, social and economic diversity. Diversity is a major source of future options and of a system's capacity to respond to change.

2. ECOLOGICAL VARIABILITY. A resilient world would embrace and work with ecological variability (rather than attempting to control and reduce it). A forest that is never allowed to burn loses its fire-resistant species and becomes very vulnerable to fire.

3. MODULARITY. A resilient world consists of modular components. When over-connected, shocks are rapidly transmitted through the system - as a forest connected by logging roads can allow a wild fire to spread wider than it would otherwise.

4. ACKNOWLEDGING SLOW VARIABLES. A resilient world would have a policy that focus on “slow,” controlling variables associated with thresholds. By focusing on the key slow variables that configure a social-ecological system, and the thresholds that lie along them, we have a greater capacity to manage the resilience of a system.

5. TIGHT FEEDBACKS. A resilient world possesses tight feedbacks (but not too tight). Feedbacks allow us to detect thresholds before we cross them. Globalization is leading to delayed feedbacks that were once tighter. For example, people of the developed world receive weak feedback signals about the consequences of their consumption.

6. SOCIAL CAPITAL. A resilient world promotes trust, well developed social networks and leadership (adaptability). Individually, these attributes contribute to what is generally termed "social capital," but they need to act in concert to effect adaptability - the capacity to respond to change and disturbance.

7. INNOVATION. A resilient world places an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules, and embracing change. When rigid connections and behaviors are broken, new opportunities open up and new resources are made available for growth.

8. OVERLAP IN GOVERNANCE. A resilient world has institutions that include "redundancy" in their governance structures and a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights. Redundancy in institutions increases the diversity of responses and the flexibility of a system. Because access and property rights lie at the heart of many resource-use tragedies, overlapping rights and a mix of common and private property rights can enhance the resilience of linked social-ecological systems.

9. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES. A resilient world would include all the unpriced ecosystem services – such as carbon storage, water filtration and so on - in development proposals and assessments. These services are often the ones that change in a regime shift – and are often only recognized and appreciated when they are lost.

We can use the above vision to start drafting our own version of such a world. It shouldn’t be that difficult. And for our own sake, and for the future of our children and grandchildren, we better start working on building such a resilient world.

Assessing Community Resilience

I think it is very important to start evaluating the resilience of our communities, so we can understand how vulnerable we are towards all the upcoming changes. With this in mind, let me share a possible model for doing this, developed here in BC.

Starting in 1998, the Community Resilience Project was set by the Centre for Community Enterprise, out of Port Alberni, BC. The origins of the project lie in the concerns of BC’s small, resource-dependent communities. The main goal of the project was to develop a conceptual framework and process through which resource-dependent communities could work to strengthen their local resilience. In 2000 they delivered the Community Resilience Model to assist communities with assessing their resilience.

They define a resilient community as “one that takes intentional actions to enhance the personal and collective capacity of its citizens and institutions to respond to and influence the course of social and economic change.”

Their model has four interconnected dimensions: people, organizations, resources and community process. Each dimension has a set of resilience characteristics, for a grand total of 23 characteristics. They say these characteristics are not exhaustive, but they have proven to be strongly predictive in assessing resilience.

The following are the resilience characteristics for each one of the dimensions:

Resilient People
- Leadership is representative of the community
- Elected community leadership is visionary, shares power, and builds consensus
- Community members are involved in significant community decisions
- The community feels a sense of pride
- People feel optimistic about the future of the community
- There is a spirit of mutual assistance and co-operation in the community
- People feel a sense of attachment to their community
- The community is self-reliant and looks to itself and its own resources to address major issues
- There is a strong belief in and support for education at all levels

Resilient Resources
- Employment in the community is diversified beyond a single large employer
- Major employers in the community are locally owned
- The community has a strategy for increasing independent local ownership
- There is openness to alternative ways of earning a living and economic activity
- The community looks outside itself to seek and secure resources (skills, expertise, and finance) that will address identified areas of weakness
- The community is aware of its competitive position in the broader economy

Resilient Organizations

-There are a variety of community economic development (CED) organizations in the community such that the key CED functions are well-served

-Organizations in the community have developed partnerships and collaborative working relationships

Resilient Community Process
-The community has a community economic development plan that guides its development
- Citizens are involved in the creation and implementation of the community vision and goals
- There is on-going action towards achieving the goals in the CED Plan
- There is regular evaluation of progress towards the community’s strategic goals
- Organizations use the CED Plan to guide their actions
- The community adopts a development approach that encompasses all segments of the population

Using the above framework, they developed the Community Resilience Manual that describes a process to help communities with assessing their resilience level. The process has 3 major steps, first it drafts a portrait of community resilience, then establishes community priorities and lastly, it selects strategies and tools to decide actions to improve the community resilience.

The Community Resilience Manual is available, free of charge, in the Centre for Community Enterprise website at www.cedworks.com

Building Resilience

In these days of uncertainty and crises, I am quite worried about the future of my grandchildren. Not one day goes by without bad news on the economy, the ecology, or the social scene. It seems as if everything is having a breakdown: the problems from climate change keep worsening day by day; poverty and epidemics are rampant in the poorest countries, where thousands of children die each day for lack of water, food or medicine; and in the wealthy countries, millions of people are losing their jobs, their homes, their way of living.

Trying to make sense of all this is not easy. I often have the ugly feeling no one really knows what is happening. I’ve found that taking a systems thinking approach helps me to make some sense. This is a complex matter, let me share some basic concepts.

A system is a group of interacting, interrelated and interdependent components that form a complex and unified whole. Systems are everywhere -the respiratory system in our body, the banking system, a forest ecosystem, and a health care system. There are many ecological (ecosystems), economic, and social systems. Many of these systems have very close interrelationships and have an effect on each other in many ways. At times this effect is positive, and at other times negative.

All systems have a natural adaptive cycle with 3 main phases: growth, collapse, regeneration, and back to growth. Looking at the way a forest works, we can see an example of the adaptive cycle concept: it stays in a growth phase for many years, then for natural causes reaches its limit (i.e.: a fire, a pine beetle outbreak), collapses, regenerates itself and starts a new cycle.

At the same time that many systems are interdependent and working together, no adaptive cycle exists in isolation. For instance, in his book, The Upside of Down, Thomas Homer-Dixon says, “above the forest's cycle is the larger and slower-moving cycle of the regional ecosystem, and above that, in turn, is the even slower cycle of global biogeochemical processes, where planetary flows of materials and elements-like carbon-can be measured in time spans of years, decades, or even millennia. Below the forest's adaptive cycle, on the other hand, are the smaller and faster cycles of sub-ecosystems that encompass, for instance, particular hillsides or streams.”

What seems to be happening now is that many systems are at the end of their growth phase, almost at the same time, and in many cases we are forcing to artificially over-extend their growth phase. For instance, with the attitude of business-as-usual and the economic bailouts we are trying to extend the growth phase for some systems that are at the end of that phase. By doing this, these systems are getting more complex and highly vulnerable, and no matter what, these systems will eventually collapse in a major breakdown.

Now, when several interconnected systems are at the end of their growth phase at the same time, the overall vulnerability level is very high and the risk of a deep collapse, or synchronous failure, is extreme. A few of the systems with a high vulnerability level are the financial system, the global food system, many ecosystems, the housing system. Several authors have suggested that many of these signs of a potential global collapse are similar to what happened during the collapse of the Roman, the Mayan, the Easter Island civilizations.

The bottom line is that we are facing dramatic system changes, in the economic, social and ecological areas, and we better accept this fact and be ready for them.

Adopting an attitude of resiliency and building resilience is a way that will help us in this transition.

Many systems are currently in a high level of vulnerability. A system is vulnerable to the extent that it is not resilient.

We can say that vulnerability and resilience are two sides of the same coin. We have the opportunity to build resilience in those systems critical to our well being; like food, water, and energy systems. ”

My old Webster’s dictionary defines resilience as “the ability to recover rapidly, as from misfortune: buoyancy.

In an ecological context, resilience is defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.”

The Community Resilience Project Team says, a resilient community “intentionally develop personal and collective capacity of its citizens and institutions to respond to and influence the course of social and economic change.”

I personally like the last definition, because it not only involves all members in a community, but it also says we can influence the course of the change. As Richard Heinberg says “it’s no longer about saving the planet but rather, cooperating with the changes the planet is forcing upon us.”

Building resilience is key to avoiding the synchronous failure. And by building resilience in our systems, the collapse phase may be less violent and disruptive.

Resilience is not about staying the same, nor is it about preventing change. It is about increasing our capacity to change and adapt.

A shorter definition I like says resilience refers to a capacity for continuous reconstruction.

In practical terms, building resilience will mean actions like:

- Working on localization efforts in our communities

- Working on local foods programs via small-scale agricultural systems that build on the knowledge of farmers and local communities

- Curtailing all our consumerism

- Reducing the size of our families

- Having a diversity of land use: farms, community gardens, aquaculture, forests, and orchards

- Promoting local industries

- Supporting the concepts of sharing goods and services, co-ops, collective industries, trading

- Investing in off-the-grid, community-owned renewable energy systems

- Relearning old skills: repair things; raising livestock; cheese making; wild food and medicines

- Working together for common community causes, without being afraid of making mistakes

- Thinking in opportunities and solutions, instead of problems

- Stop whining and take action

Let us accept that the Era of Exuberance and Procrastination is over, and we are in the beginning of the Era of Consequences.

The future of my grandkids looks gloomy, but reason tells me we can still turn those consequences into opportunities for making that transition into something better. Let us start working, today, in building resilience in our systems.

To learn more about Resilience, check these resources:

Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems by C.S. Holling.

The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon.

Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World by Brian Walker.

The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience by Rob Hopkins.

Ecology and Society magazine. They offer many free online articles. Check their website at www.ecologyandsociety.org

Resilience Alliance. Probably the most comprehensive site on the subject. Check their website at www.resalliance.org/1.php