Where Are We Going to Find Five More Earths?

An "ecological footprint" is a measure of the amount of resources needed to sustain one person and absorb her/his wastes. In the United States, the ecological footprint of the average U.S. citizen is large compared to most other countries in the world. If everyone in the world lived like the average U.S. citizen, the global community would need six planets. While Costco sells many useful household items in large sizes, they don’t sell planets, in singles or in five-packs.

Our planet is a savings account. We are currently living off the interest and drawing down the principal. To be sustainable, we need to find a way to live off the interest; that is, use renewable resources and not use them up faster than they can replenish themselves.

Will the Great Transition to a Sustainable Future Be Painful?

Last summer, my family and I traveled to the Monteverde Cloud Forest, an isolated rainforest preserve in Costa Rica. The 30 kilometer unpaved road to Monteverde demanded slow driving to avoid sharp rocks, jack-knifed tractor trailers, large potholes, and mudslides. The ride was physically painful for our backs and gave us headaches. But after relaxing over night in one of the sustainable tourism hotels and touring the nature preserve, we knew the journey had been worth the trouble. We enjoyed the peace and robust beauty of the jungle the next day during a guided tour where we saw a two-toed sloth, a tarantula, hummingbirds, and the rare quetzal bird.

The drive to Monteverde is an apt metaphor for our society’s journey to a sustainable future: the trip may cause temporary, mild discomfort but the destination will meet our needs in new and exciting ways.

What will mild discomfort mean? Is it painful to reduce waste? There are so many examples in our society where we waste material resources. The broken irrigation sprinklers that flood the nearby street waste water. Uneaten prepared food that is thrown away wastes food. A freight ship idling at a port wastes petroleum and creates air pollution. None of these wastes add value in our society.

Then there are the larger systemic changes. Over the next generation, we need to redesign our societies to encourage smart growth, create closed-loop manufacturing systems, and transition to organic agriculture. These will all involve investments in our future that we need to make anyway.

What Does a Sustainable Future Look Like?

Think about the happiest times of your life. Where were you? Who were you with? Were you watching television or shopping?

Some of my best memories include parties and dinners with friends, backpacking and riding trains through Europe, hiking, attending concerts, completing big projects for work, and planting trees in my community. What do these activities have in common?

Perhaps the things that make us happiest and most fulfilled are the kinds of experiences we should be building our society and physical infrastructure around. I believe that ultimately people find meaningful work, community, music, art, nature and spirituality more fulfilling than activities that isolate us physically and bankrupt us financially. Could this be a clue to how we could create a sustainable future?

What Is Greenwashing?

To paraphrase U.S Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart from Jacobellis v.Ohio (1964), "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." This is how I feel about greenwashing. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't quite illuminate the essence of the term with the definition "disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image" because it doesn't distinguish between enlightened corporate behavior that helps build a sustainable future from cynical corporate behavior that confuses the public with green claims.

Perhaps there is a formula we could devise to determine if a company is greenwashing. If a company spends X dollars to buy renewable energy credits then spends X dollars times 1,000 to publicize it, its efforts could be characterized as greenwashing.

Many people cite WalMart as a prime example of greenwashing but the case is not so clear. WalMart set and met its goal of selling 100 million compact fluorescent lamps and is in the process of raising the average fuel efficiency of its trucking fleet from 6 mpg to 18 mpg. They are building new stores that meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building criteria, are buying renewable energy, and are demanding that their suppliers reduce packaging. And yet last I heard, they still didn't offer health insurance to most of their employees, and the siting and shuttering of their stores is disruptive to many communities.

But any sustainability efforts with such far reaching effects should be praised, while we keep the pressure on these organizations to do more. While WalMart is not perfect, their efforts are made in the spirit of continuous improvement.

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Is Hope a Four Letter Word?

I will structure the next several blogs in a question and answer format. The questions are ones that seem to be floating unanswered around the media lately. I propose answers to these questions given my professional experience and study of sustainability issues over the past 17 years.

In the face of global environmental trends, increasing population, rising natural resource consumption, and the fact that the 2 billion people around this world who live on less than two dollars a day deserve to have their basic needs of food, shelter, clean water, sanitation, education and health care met; is there hope for a sustainable future?

When you take an honest, hard look at environmental and social equity trends, the future looks bleak. However, what good does it do to throw our hands up? Philip James Bailey, author of Festus, wrote "The worst way to improve the world is to condemn it." With that in mind, we should think about issues globally because we're all part of the interconnected web of life on this planet and do what we can at a local level. Hopefully our efforts will serve as a role model for others. It takes a brave effort to actually hope and help build that sustainable future.

I challenge you to create your own vision of what a sustainable future looks like. I don't think this has been done yet in a way that is appealing to the public. A sustainable future should incorporate elements that make it appear even better than what we have today. Think about sustainability elements: organic agriculture, mass transit, closed loop manufacturing and renewable energy. There are so many benefits from these four elements. Organic food tastes better than conventionally grown produce, it has about 20% more vitamins, and is better for the environment. When mass transit goes where I need to go, it's far better than driving: I can read a book instead of fighting stop-and-go traffic. Closed loop manufacturing reduces waste and saves manufacturers money. Renewable energy supports small businesses, reduces the amount of carcinogens released, reduces air pollution, and, because it is often decentralized, is less of a terrorist target.

A sustainable future needs us to envision it and it needs us to make it happen.

A Vision for a Sustainable Future

There are so many stories about a future of deprivation, sacrifice and terror that are told and retold in various ways in our society. If we envision a different, more hopeful future, it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. A sustainable future could be one of abundance, health and community if we redesign our society the right way.

But what does a sustainable future look like and how do we get there? This is a question I'd like to explore through an on-line dialogue.