Pardon the drama but if you’re a regular reader of this publication then this is a question you’ve no doubt wrestled with.  Sleepless one night, I had a notion to look it up on thesaurus.com. The answer by return was  “Did you mean ‘sustain’ ‘ability’. I wasn’t sure what I meant.

What I did know was that I had a hard time explaining what I did for a living. “I promote sustainability” ….silence…. more silence… is that like recycling and stuff?  “Well that’s part of it but it’s really about meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs……yawn…it’s about the system….uh..you know, waste equals food ?…blank stare.

Eventually most of us find a piece of the sustainability pie we like and can explain.  Work life’s a bit easier to explain when you’re in “renewable energy” or “biofuels” or the “waste business”.

But of course that’s also part of the problem.  We can’t move toward sustainability if we each take a piece of it and drag it into the silos of our individual specialties, expertise or even fancies.  Operating at this micro level focuses us on the small problems right in front of us rather than their root causes.  We solve one problem only to create another.  Whatever sustainability means it must imply the ability to sustain the broader system rather than bits of it.  We must understand the whole system and use this to inform the detail of what we do on a daily basis.  The drive to introduce CFL lightbulbs is in my opinion a good example of focusing too much on the wrong end of the problem.  There’s no doubt that their use will reduce C02 emissions and thus combat climate change,  but does anyone really know the affects of the widespread use of mercury contained in these bulbs?  Is this really a small price to pay?  Shouldn’t we at least ask the question? Perhaps then we can proactively put the appropriate safeguards in place.

Sometimes it seems like we career from one emergency to the next because we react to problems rather than planning to prevent them.  To avoid a crash we’d need only to look up, to make the connection between our needs and the needs of the system we depend on.  “Wendell Berry of the world bank said that we have lived by the assumption that what’s good for us is good for the world,  we were wrong, we must now learn to live by the reverse assumption that what’s good for the world is good for us”. This is often referred to as the ‘enlightened self interest’ where our interests are aligned with those of the broader system we depend on – a kind of a win win if you like.

Makes sense but where do we start?   Well, we need an overview of how the whole system works and what it’s basic needs are to run properly.  Imagine you’re a god and you just got the earth as a present.  After taking it out of it’s box you reach for the manual – go to the page that says ‘care instructions’, what does it say?

Dear Customer,

You are now the proud owner of a highly complex and self regulating planet earth. If you take care of it it will give you many eons years of enjoyment.  Follow these simple principles to keep it running beautifully:

Thankfully such principles are not just in my imagination but do in fact exist as part of The Natural Step, a framework for sustainability developed by Dr Karl Henrik Robert in Sweden.   The story behind the framework is worth telling.  Dr Robert was a paediatric oncologist and well regarded for curing up to 60% of his patients.  However whatever progress he made was more than outweighed by the increase in the incidence of cancer itself.  He realized that it would be more effective to work further upstream on the cause of the problem rather than on the symptoms (cancer) further down.  Somehow the way society was designed, all the way down to the basic principle level, inevitably led to a greater and greater decline in the conditions necessary to maintain life and health.  Cancer was just one example of this unraveling.  Pollution, loss of biodiversity, climate change etc. are similarly results of this same societal design flaw.

Dr Robert knew he needed to understand how society was breaking nature’s rules. To understand this was also to understand how to comply with them and thus slowly over time cut the problem of unsustainability off at source.  Over the course of the following 12 months Robert collaborated with experts from a broad array of scientific disciplines to agree the conditions necessary for a sustainable society. 21 drafts later they’d achieved consensus. Together the resultant four “system conditions” or principles defined, in scientifically robust terms what “sustainability” actually meant.

That was in 1988.  Today the Natural Step is a not for profit organisation helping companies such as Nike, McDonalds and Interface carpets as well as over 100 local authorities in twelve countries (including Sweden, The US, Canada, New Zealand, Italy, France Etc.) to reduce costs, risk and waste while increasing stakeholder goodwill.

Of course few organizations, if any will achieve sustainability in our lifetime but having an agreed and shared set of principles that define sustainability in robust scientific terms is surely a good place to start – with less drama too!!

John Harrington is a director of RealEyes Sustainability Ltd.  You can contact him at john@realeyes.ie

This article originally featured in Local Planet magazine