Thanks to In2In Thinking for the following article.

THINKING ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY
By: H. Thomas Johnson

Sustainability currently ranks as one of the most popular programs being touted by management consultants, business gurus and MBA educators. As with so many programs for "business excellence" that have gained popularity in the past fifty years - including synergy, strategic cost management, total quality, reengineering, organizational learning, lean manufacturing, leadership, innovation and more - sustainability promises great benefits. But just like those past programs, it does not encourage business leaders to reconsider conventional thinking about what it means to do business. Consequently, sustainability programs build on the flawed assumption that economic well-being depends upon endless growth - a growth that is now occurring at a suicidal rate.

"...sustainability promises great benefits...[but] it does not encourage business leaders to reconsider conventional thinking..."

It is a well-known fact that our push for ceaseless economic growth is creating very adverse conditions for life as humans have always known it on Earth. Driven for fifty-some years by the imperative to maximize their owners' financial wealth, businesses relentlessly produce more and more goods for humans to consume. "Restraint" and "moderation" are no more words in their lexicon than is awareness of Earth's inability to sustain this wild production pace. Addressing the adverse impact of this production on Earth's system calls for new ways to think about doing business.

Today, the industrial economy uses Earth's resources at rates that hugely exceed the capacity of Earth to regenerate and restore those resources. Making this possible is the fact that humans in the past century began to generate energy from Earth's fixed supply of fossil fuel at a rate several thousand times the rate at which the Sun supplies energy to the Earth each day. Over a few billion years, Earth's life-support systems adapted remarkably well to the Sun's daily supply of energy. Then, the human economy recently imposed a wildly extravagant flow of new energy onto those support systems, significantly dislocating the chemical balance of Earth's atmosphere and causing increased and intensified human occupation and degradation of Earth's habitat. In turn, this atmospheric dislocation and habitat disruption have resulted in long-term climate change and a sharp rise in extinction of non-human life species.

If, as many experts claim, business activities are primarily responsible for severely diminishing Earth's resources and throwing the ecosystem into dangerous imbalance, surely business leaders must revise the way they think about their mission. However, sustainability programs do not seem to be altering their basic, conventional assumptions about the role of business in society. Advocates of sustainability do propose changing the way businesses design, produce, and sell the products that most humans consume. These sustainability programs advocate that businesses promote "eco-efficiency," the steady pursuit of ways to produce each unit of output with less energy and less raw material, especially less fossil fuel. Unfortunately, sustainability programs do not introduce new ways of thinking about the purpose of business, notably the notion that a business exists to maximize its owners' financial wealth. Because sustainability programs do not question conventional thinking, they do not mitigate the drive to sell more and more. That imperative remains intact, unchallenged. Consequently, gains in resource efficiency that sustainability programs achieve are invariably offset by increases in total output.

Eco-efficiency is not sufficient to eliminate the problem that our industrial growth economy poses for Earth's ecosystem because it does nothing to question the thinking that originally created the problem it is trying to solve. New thinking is required that challenges the accepted idea that economic welfare requires humans to consume more and businesses to grow year after year after year. Whereas sustainability programs currently encourage people to improve how efficiently they perform an activity, they ought to be asking instead, whether people should be engaged in the activity at all. Every business that advocates sustainability should ask: Is our way of doing things compatible with stable, just communities and a robust planetary ecosystem that sustains all life?
Sustainability programs will only make a profound, lasting, and constructive difference for society and Earth when they reflect new thinking based on new values. Programs in place today place a high value on finding environmentally efficient ways to produce more and more goods for consumers and gaining increased financial wealth for owners of capital. At best, they reflect the interest of companies that want above all to do business as usual but that are willing, to their credit, to make some modifications to limit the destruction. Limiting the destruction, however, is not enough. Sustainability programs need to value something other than merely helping businesses contain the damage as they sell more and increase total output.

If they are to genuinely help humans survive on this planet, sustainability programs must reflect new thinking. New thinking informed by modern science recognizes that as long as business activities center on helping only humans thrive, the planet's health will decline rapidly. The only truly sustainable business practices are those that permit all life to continue undiminished, indefinitely. Practices designed to achieve this end must balance two imperatives. First, they must be able to provide humans the things they need to flourish in their unique habitat. Second, they must do nothing to impair the ability of all other life systems to thrive in their habitats. The level of thinking implicit in this definition of sustainability radically shifts the focus of economic discourse. Instead of focusing on the imperative of growth and the problem of "externalities" the discussion now shifts to the issue of fulfilling human needs and nurturing human talents in the context of Earth's capacity to produce and regenerate resources. And instead of turning to abstract theories of markets, prices and finance to define economic and social questions, attention now shifts to concrete knowledge of bio- and geo-systems that enlightens us about Earth's capacities - and limits - to support all life.

When sustainability programs raise informed questions that reflect a deep knowledge of ecology and cosmology, sustainability leaders will inevitably reject many currently popular answers to human social and economic problems. They will see, for example, that "competitive free market" solutions to such problems actually weaken the cooperative, communal bonds that characterize, and preserve, all living systems. Moreover, they will understand, just as surely as the concept of "flat earth" is wrong, so the concept of independence as a condition that supports life is wrong. Bonds and relationships pervade Earth, uniting all living systems. These relationships, not competitive struggle among independent systems, sustain and enrich life. Finally, as their scientific knowledge of Earth's system further deepens, sustainability leaders will realize that private ownership of more than one's immediate living space is inconsistent with any system that operates like Earth's ecosystem.

Sustainability is not something for we humans to define in terms compatible with human intellectual abstractions. It is not a practice we invent to apply to economic and social affairs. Sustainability is a condition that already exists. It is there, where it has been for over 4 billion years, in Earth's magnificently evolving system. The relationships in this intricate system nurture and sustain all life. Any human theory of economic or social activity that is not grounded in, and supportive of, Earth's system is not going to help us keep this planet a comfortable home "unto the seventh generation." For example, "triple bottom line" is a concept not grounded in a sound understanding of Earth's dynamic system of interrelationships. It invites us to think about the dynamic and multi-dimensional interrelationships between Earth's ecosystem and human activity through the one-dimensional and linear quantitative language of finance, economics and accounting.

Instead of using the triple bottom line to reduce all human and environmental issues to the language of economics and finance, true sustainability programs require a concept that discourses about economic issues using the language of relationships and community, the language of Gaia. What if our behavior makes it impossible for Earth to sustain human life as we know it? All the sustainability programs in the world that seek results by making adjustments to the status quo cannot do enough to guarantee true sustainability. Only thinking at a new level can do that. Sustainability programs need to transcend our conventional economic and social ideas and focus with laser-like attention on one paramount concern: living in harmony with Earth's entire biosystem, with all life, and maintaining the bonds and relationships that enable such harmony. We need to live nature's way, fitting in and cooperating, not compelling, competing and destroying.

Dr. Tom Johnson, a Professor of Business Administration at the Portland State University School of Business Administration, has authored numerous papers and books including Profit Beyond Measure and Relevance Lost, and was a featured keynote speaker and workshop leader at several In2:InThinking Network conferences.