Ray Anderson, The Ecology of Commerce, and The Next Sustainability Wave

My first experience with a company that really thought outside the box for transformational change, for sustainability and success is Interface Carpets.  Their CEO, Ray Anderson, tells the story in many YouTube videos - here is one of them:

One of the resources Ray Anderson often referred to as the first great eye-opener to help him understand the concept of business helping to shape a new more sustainable world was the book The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken (1993).  I think I read this book many years ago when I first became interested in this topic.

A similar, more recent book on the topic is The Next Sustainability Wave by Bob Willard (2005).  This I haven't read, but it looks like the title is referring to the necessary mass-movement towards sustainability by the business sector - as opposed to the first early adopters - and explains how to sell the transformational thinking concept to business leaders.  It sounds like the kind of thing I'll want to read.  Bob Willard also has a website advertising resources for sustainability champions, good on him.

This kind of stuff leads to competitions, so a few years ago the Global 100 list was started, naming the 100 most sustainable companies of each year.  Anything that helps spur things along!

The Business Case

What is Sustainable Practice?

WWF Living Planet Report 2010

Another easy to read report on how we are living beyond our means and what we could do to avert total collapse.  This one focusses mainly on the LPI (Living Planet Index) and other recently developed measurement indicators for ecosystems and resources (such as ecological footprints) based on the premise that "what gets measured gets managed".  The overriding message is nicely summarised at the end of the introduction by James Leape, Director General of WWF International: "These challenges further emphasize the importance of decoupling development from growing demands on the natural resources.  Put plainly, we have to devise ways of getting as much, and more, from much less.  Continuing to consume the Earth's resources more quickly than they can be replenished is destroying the very systems on which we depend.  We have to move to managing resources on nature's terms and on nature's scale."

Footprinting products

I've always been fascinated with ways to assess product footprints and life-cycles.  Here are two examples of such attempts:  The Patagonia Footprint Chronicles and -my favourite- The Good Guide website (and App on my iPhone! although more NZ products need to be included still before it really works here).

Ecological Footprinting

I read Ella Lawton's paper submission on her New Zealand Footprint project.  I had another look over the notes I took when she spoke to us during our block course also.  As a scientist, I really like the idea of measuring our impacts on the environment because I see how it can give us comfort and reassurance about what we are doing, but I get quite disappointed with the limitations of the approach.  I am a holistic thinker, and so it really annoys me when I'm working hard on something and using tools that aren't able to meet my needs completely.  On the other hand though, I like problems, and so the chance to help make it better does excite me.  Overall, I'm glad someone devised it - measurement tools are important for stewardship and governance! Heres a quick example of how it works from a 'top down' approach:

Amount of bioproductive land (e.g. 11.9 billion hectares) / Amount of people in the world (e.g. 7 billion humans) = 1.7 hectares/person is a 'fair Earth share' on a worldwide view. 

So, the amount of bioproductive land it takes to run you and your life, is your ecological footprint.  This is always a representation of what you are taking from the Earth.  Conversely, what you do to give to the earth and its capacity to function, is your ecological handprint

I enjoyed watching the Centre for Sustainable Practice presentation on this topic because I finally understand this topic better, especially how the ecological overshoot is calculated.  Here are my notes:

I calculated my ecological footprint using one of the many calculators, I chose this one because I don't have data on my electricity and gas bills, so I'm not sure how accurate it is because its easy to just come out similar to the national average I imagine but it came up with 3.2 earths for my lifestyle.  I later found the Project Litefoot calculator also allows for lots of 'average' entries and so it came up with a similar result.  It doesn't seem too far fetched because so far the best estimates on New Zealander's average footprints are up around 7.7 hectares per person.   If you do have detailed information you can use other calculators for NZ such as here and here.  I think that people can only really be expected to substantially lower their footprints when the system they live in (i.e. governance and business) makes it easier for them.  It's the chicken and the egg problem at the moment, right?

I also used the tried calculating my ecological handprint, the opposite of the footprint being the actions that one takes to make things better for the environment, and it turned out to be around 21 I think (it's not very precise or anything, but doing it helps your brain understand what is meant by the concept).

The story of ...

Here's a chance to see more of Annie Leonard's short videos on the history and happenings of various industries over time...

Strong Sustainability for New Zealand

This is a document that a large group of New Zealanders worked on only a few years ago to give people a description of what strong sustainability would mean in the context of a nation, as well as some fictional stories to show what might be required to get there.  The concept is a really good idea, and employing storytelling makes it quite easy to keep reading a document that long.  I'm not sure who the intended audience was, so I'll assume it is for a small group of interested individuals.  The idealistic nature is important to this document (it would be very disappointing if it didn't explore sustainability seriously enough) but it's a big leap with some vital and practical steps not articulated.  I think to have a more stimulating effect, such a concept would need to be delivered more succinctly with very careful framing for the particular audience(s), and obviously more exposure than quietly sitting on a website requiring payment before download.  Since the authors describe their message with so much passion for urgency, I'm surprised it is not freely accessible.

The Stern Review

I am told that the Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change which came out in 2006 carried a lot of weight in convincing more of the global business community that climate change is a real force to be reckoned with - believable to them as it came from economists they trust.  I guess since it took that long they could do nothing but be blunt with the analysis and recommendations.  They even call climate change "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen".

The first sentence reads "The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response." Welcome to the club, the scientific evidence has been overwhelming for some time... but it just shows how much effective communication in the right frame and the right channels is worth more than the opposite in quantity.

It makes it very clear that climate change threatens the ability for humans to meet their basic needs, and that the transition to avoid this (i.e. a low-carbon economy) will also bring many opportunities.  I often find it odd how many businesses/industries baulk at change (and there are plenty doing that at the moment), when change is the only thing that is constant, and innovation is what separates the leaders from the strugglers.  After all, they are very clear about the way things are heading: "markets for low-carbon technologies could be worth at least $500bn by 2050".

It is uplifting to see that the authors called for "Greater international co-operation to accelerate technological innovation and diffusion" to reduce the costs in this transition.  Businesses are still run by humans, and it is a very strong human trait to band together on the door of global threat - so hearing this from a community that values competition highly shows that they 'get it'.

The main point of their report that: "The benefits of strong, early action considerably outweigh the costs" by addressing the issue with prevention they estimate around 1% annual GDP spending to 2050, as opposed to 5-20% if we would rather clean up the mess.

When reading the recommendations, especially the ones that involve government intervention, I couldn't help but feel disappointed that our NZ government's actions don't live up to (m)any of them.  They continue to want to be a part of the dinosaur economy by cutting up our virgin landscape for lignite and are systematically weakening our ETS one review at a time so that is far from showing people the true cost of their actions and consumptions.  I continue to hold out hope though, I'd love to see a clean green NZ that leads in this just as it did in many other moral topics.

Johan Rockstrom - Planetary Boundaries

Let the environment guide our development is the name of Johan Rockstrom's 2010 TED talk.  He succinctly provides a very clear and visual description of the current situation we find ourselves in: firstly, by pointing out how comfortable our climate has been in the last 10,000 years of our development and then by outlining the major pressures we are putting on the planet (which have led to what some scientists are now describing as the 'anthropocene' - a new era where humans are the major driver of planetary system changes).  He then introduces the concept of 'thresholds' which could tip the planet into a new state and how scientists are trying to identify these so that we can move towards operating in a safe zone within them.  He is optimistic that the current crisis presents a great opportunity for humanity, if simultaneous collaboration can manage to 'bend the curves' of exponentially increasing trends that are leading us towards these thresholds within the next 10-40 years.  He is under no delusions about the fact that the biggest challenge will be achieving the shift in mindset required for this.