I came down to Washington DC yesterday to visit family and go to a Bat Mitzvah, and figured I would leave my blog alone for a few days. An epic storm changed my plans. Here we are Saturday noon and it is still coming down. I haven’t seen anything like this since the Blizzard of 78 up in Boston. It looks we are stuck in the house until, hopefully, Monday when I am due to return. The photo shows a big broken branch resting on my daughter’s car. Yesterday the grocery stores looked like an army of looters had swept through with many shelves completely devoid of anything. Nothing much to do with sustainability except to provide a couple of days with little to do but read, reflect, and admire the power of nature.

I have now seen a lot of news from Davos and the World Economic Forum. Sustainability shows up in two of ten top themes as reported by Business Week. The number one theme was a sense that the world is not in good shape. Of course, the major concern at this meeting was focused on the financial health, but issues like water scarcity and climate change found a place alongside the financial meltdown and recession. There was broad consensus that the global and national institutions need to be re-invented to cope with the complexities of a globalized community.

Sustainability was recognized as an idea whose time has come.

As one executive put it: “It’s no longer about the green economy; it’s about the economy.” Sustainability is the central issue many businesses face.” … CEOs everywhere at Davos said we’ve now arrived at the point where sustainability must be integrated into the business strategy: What is a business and how it does it operate and relate to the rest of the world? We’ll see if they walk the talk.

In a separate report coming from Davos, the author may agree with the point that sustainability cannot be ignored by business leaders, but says that there is still a lot of differences abut what sustainability means.

The disagreements aggravate the uncertainties and inconsistencies around sustainable design. If designers and the people they work with can’t agree on common standards, the quality of “sustainable” design will continue to be questionable. How can the rest of us be expected to measure the sustainable impact of the things we buy? And how can we be confident about the way in which they were designed, manufactured, shipped, and will eventually be disposed of?

The subject was designing for sustainability, a subject I certainly am always interested in. The article reported on a roundtable discussion by three of the world’s leading “sustainability” designers, who were asked to present two successful and one unsuccessful designs.

For me differences in meaning and design results were overshadowed by the inclusion of a couple of behavior-changing examples. The Japanese governments, CoolBiz initiative, broke longstanding dress codes, and got employees to come to work in very light garments so that air conditioning loads could be reduced. Reducing the stigma of breaking norms—so strong in Japan—was a key to the overall design of this program.

While important product design innovations were employed, the key element was the design of the rules of a new game. No amount of clever industrial design, such that Bill McDonough or Tim Brown of IDEO, two of the panelists, are expert at producing, will create sustainability without including innovations in the institutional context that will cause people to change their consumption habits. It will certainly help the Earth if we learn to consume better, but what it really will take is to learn how to consume less and differently. Economic growth will surely cancel green design eco-efficiency gains sometime in the future.

Most of the days I am hard pressed to feel good when I start to plan my blogging entry. (Disclosure: I have very little hair left.) David Brooks, writing his column in the NYTimes, is very reassuring to folks at my stage of life. Contrasting recent findings to the threatening ideas of Freud, Walt Whitman, or Shakespeare, Brooks paints a much rosier picture of the seventh stage of man than Jacques paints in his famous monologue: “Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Developmental psychologists, when they treated old age at all, often regarded it as a period of withdrawal. The elderly slowly separate themselves from the world. They cannot be expected to achieve new transformations. “About the age of fifty,” Freud wrote, “the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking. Old people are no longer educable.” Well, that was wrong. Over the past few years, researchers have found that the brain is capable of creating new connections and even new neurons all through life.

Brooks, not surprisingly with his interest in sociology, points to another kind of factor.

One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t.

The gist of the article is that, although these and other findings should bring comfort to the aging, the reverse is true for the younger generations. Social programs now in place take resources from the young and funnel it to the aging.

The odd thing is that when you turn to political life, we are living in an age of reverse-generativity. Far from serving the young, the old are now taking from them. First, they are taking money. According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.

Brooks is skeptical about rebalancing the flow of public funds at the hands of the political system, and suggests that we old guys should lead the charge out of care for our families and the future. Brooks suggests not so subtly that this unbalance is not sustainable. Explicit manifestations of caring are a key feature of sustainability. So, maybe he does has something of interest to this blog’s basic theme here.

Spontaneous social movements can make the unthinkable thinkable, and they can do it quickly. It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power… It may seem unrealistic — to expect a generation to organize around the cause of nonselfishness. But in the private sphere, you see it every day. Old people now have the time, the energy and, with the Internet, the tools to organize. The elderly. They are our future.

Hmm… I wonder how many of us even know that Twitter exists or have a page on Facebook?

More consequences of the extensive time spent in front of screens by children keeps showing up in the media. The Boston Globe today ran a column decrying the state of children’s health. The author, Terry Schraeder, a physician, points to data showing increasing signs of disease and poor health in children. Specifically, he picks out very high lipid levels—symptoms that traditionally belong to older people. This condition bodes poorly for these children because, he noters, “We know that untreated cholesterol disorders in children are linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease in adulthood.”

The most striking and disturbing piece in the column was the tale of his experience tending the kids at a summer camp.

Of the 850 children in attendance, more than one-third would line up daily to receive medication they had brought from home - and this was a camp for healthy kids. Medications for anxiety, asthma, gastric problems, blood pressure, blood sugar, skin disorders, and weight issues were handed out three times a day.

He wondered whether the cause was excessive pushing by the the pharmaceutical industry, normal health profiles at these ages, or some societal factor causing poor health. These same over-medicated children exhibited poor stamina, overweight, and inability to perform physical activities. “They often looked happier sitting on the sidelines listening to iPods or eating than taking part in any exercise.”

Based on the Kaiser Family Foundation report I refer to in a couple of recent posts, Schraeder suggests that the long hours spent in front of screens of one kind or another are involved. It’s hard not to come to that conclusion even for a medical layman. My previous comments have been directed to the impact of all this media-based technology on children. He, noting also that the health of children presages the health of the whole society, wonders about the future of us grown-ups. Isn’t this situation about the same as that for the environment where indicators of its poor health have been with us for a long time? Now we have more evidence that the human dimension of sustainability is in jeopardy. Popping more and more pills is not going to bring us flourishing any more than putting corks in smokestacks will do the job for the Earth.

I have defined sustainability as the possibility that all life will flourish on the planet forever. Each word is carefully chosen, but it is the whole definition that is important. The expression is designed to evoke an image of a positive future, but not one where everything is defined and clear. It is designed to contrast starkly with the concepts of sustainable development or greening, both of which dominate the scene and both of which are approaches to reduce unsustainability. These last two concepts are inherently tied to the past and present, but not to the future. The future is to be like the present, but without certain threats like global warming, fisheries collapse, poverty, and so on. I don’t think we can create the world we want and that provides the good life we seek by fixing up the present. We have to start from scratch at the level of the cultural beliefs and values that drive societal action. Alfred Schutz wrote that such action “transforms the world from the future perfect to the present.” Interesting how the word perfect is applies to a grammatical tense.

My definition implies and requires such a new approach; it is full of metaphors and is evocative rather than deterministic, on purpose. Let’s look at the key pieces. First the word sustainability. The earliest use of the word in regard to the concerns we all are coming from may be by Paul Ekins and Les Newby who wrote, sustainability is “the capacity for continuance more or less indefinitely into the future. (Paul Ekins and Les Newby, “Sustainable Wealth Creation at the Local Level in an Age of Globalization,” Regional Studies 32, no. 9 (December 1998): 865. I missed this article in writing my book. It would have made my arguments much stronger.) The word does not imply what that something should be.

Again, sustainability is simply a property (capacity) of a system to continue to produce something we want for a long time. I used forever rather than “indefinitely” because it emphasizes the importance of thinking far into the future. I recently read a paper that criticizes this usage. as reflecting a “fallacy recurring in the work of many environmentalists that we might call the finitude fallacy.” (The paper is “Is Sustainability Sustainable?”, by Daniel Bonevac, Academic Questions, published online January 21, 2010. I apologize that the article itself is available only to the journal subscribers.)

I beg to differ. The fallacy is normally applied to resources or, as Bonevac quotes, “material things.” It is flourishing that is the “something” that emerges from the system in my definition. But flourishing is not a material substance. We are pretty sure that life on Earth will end no later than when the sun explodes, but that’s pretty close to forever in the way that both many poets and ordinary people use the word. The two senses of forever are like the images of a parallel set of lines (going to infinity) and their vanishing point (finitude) where they appear to end to an observer.

Further, I use the idea of possibility rather than capacity to go on and on. Possibilty involves some real capacity for production, but is not the same. Possibility uncouples the future from the past. It does imply some capacity to produce, but one we cannot imagine or design with what we know today.

There is no fallacy involved in this usage. Life may indeed flourish forever, but the meaning of flourishing will surely change as things start running out. Again, there is no contradiction or oxymoronic sense here. Bonevac misses the distinction between sustainability and sustainable. The adjectival form always modifies a noun and it is the noun that makes sustainable X as in sustainable growth oxymoronic.

Flourishing can be and has been criticized as being too squishy. Again, its use is on purpose. Flourishing, like beauty or security or freedom, is an emergent property of a system and shows up only when the whole system is working properly. It has been associated with the good life for a very long time and shows up in all cultures and eras in one form or another. The moment one tries to put a dimension to flourishing, it is transformed into a thing and instantly loses its power to make life meaningful. I grant that this characteristic makes sustainability daunting to those who are at work “managing” society through business or government or whatever. These institutions still have yet to understand the distinction between sustainability and sustainable X and the importance of following separate paths towards each end. Until they do, we will see little progress.

I am often criticized as being too academic, theoretic, or philosophical. I accept this criticism, but respond by saying that the subject of sustainability demands new ways of thinking and acting that are not present in our individual or collective consciousness. I don’t see any possibility (intentional use of the word) other than asking a lot of new and difficult questions.

Jay Leno cracked:

Apple introduced their new product, a tablet, which will revolutionize how families ignore each other.

This would be very funny if not so true.

After I wrote the last post, I read the full text of the Kaiser report on media use by 8 to 18-year old children. The part describing the impact on learning and feelings was especially troubling. I know that there are many who do not buy the arguments I make in my book, based largely on psychology or philosophy, that technology has the potential to submerge one’s sense of worldliness and understanding of what it means to be human. The Kaiser study provides some convincing data that this danger is quire real. Here are the key findings.

Youth who spend more time with media report lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment.

For purposes of comparison, young people were grouped into categories of heavy, moderate and light media users. Heavy users are those who consume more than 16 hours of media content in a typical day (21% of all 8- to 18-year-olds); moderate users are those who consume from 3-16 hours of content (63%); light users are those who consume less than three hours of media in a typical day (17%).

Nearly half (47%) of all heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly C’s or lower), compared to 23% of light media users. Heavy media users are also more likely to say they get into trouble a lot, are often sad or unhappy, and are often bored. Moreover, the relationships between media exposure and grades, and between media exposure and personal contentment, withstood controls for other possibly relevant factors such as age, gender, race, parent education, and single vs. two-parent households.

This study cannot establish whether there is a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, or between media use and personal contentment. And if there are such relationships, they could well run in both directions simultaneously.

I saw a couple of reports a few days ago that were quite disturbing. I know that children have been spending more and more time in front of some sort of screen, but I was shocked by the actual numbers involved. Neilsen Company, based on survey data, reports that preschoolers, ages 2 to 5, spend 32.5 hours in front of a television screen. I guess their thumbs are not yet developed enough to allow them to devote additional hours to texting.

The next older cohort, from 6 to 11, spend a little less time, 28 hours on the average. Neilsen explains the difference simply as the result of spending more hours at school. But that means that the children manage to find hours to make up for the much of the time lost in the classroom and doing homework. No data on the number and kind of advertisements that show up during these long hours was given in the studies. I have seen such numbers previously and they are staggering.

The Kaiser Family Foundation released a similar report with data on the viewing habits of 8 to 18 year olds. The data are more than shocking. The number of hours per day are nearly the same as what goes for a day at the office, about 7 1/2 hours every day. Texting is in addition and adds another hour and a half per day. The time connected to a screen is even longer when the growing tendency for multi-tasking is considered. Because so many are connected to more than one form of media at a time, the daily exposure increases from 7 1/2 to almost 10 3/4 hours.

While the numbers, per se, are fraught with all kinds of implications, I find this situation tells another more ominous story concerning sustainability. The way the media work puts the viewer in a kind of mindless state. The outside world disappears from consciousness. I watch the kids walk down the street completely enrapt in their iPods and mobile phones. That the consequences of ignoring the world around is causing numerous auto accidents has become well documented, and steps are being taken to make use of mobile phones and texting while driving illegal. I also read more about people walking into holes or getting into accidents while crossing the street.

I have argued that one underlying cause of unsustainability is the loss of caring for self, others, and the world. Another way to talk about this is to speak of loss of consciousness instead of care. In any case, the hours and hours spent connected to the cyberworld push out virtually all opportunities for learning to care. Walking into oncoming cars is a stark example of not being conscious of one’s own self, and the need to keep it safe and sound. The outside world is essentially invisible when one is tied to the device in one’s hand. Not only is the opportunity to care for the world eroded away, but the world itself gets lost.

Although the time spent in contact with other people via the media may be the largest segment of time other than some form of diversion, the quality of the connections is not about caring. I have written about the tendency for media devices and programs to diminish the meaning of relationships, converting understanding what friends and other forms of relationships mean into a mechanical picture.

The data on the effects of all this time spent with these devices shows increasing deleterious impacts. School performance decreases with heavy use. Other studies show a correlation between obesity and hours in front of televisions for younger watchers. A shift from fixed TV sets to portable devices makes it easier to spend more time. The effects are age, gender, and ethnicity sensitive.

Kevin Kelly of Wired fame and others see information technology as an unmitigated blessing; one that all of us, especially we of the grandparent generation, have to accept. These data don’t convince me. Without caring, sustainability cannot arrive. It takes fully conscious human beings to understand the predicament in which we have put ourselves and Earth, and the same fully conscious beings to get us out of it. The answers are not to be found on Twitter or by IMing or even on Sesame Street.

Who Knows Where the Time Goes (Sandy Denny)

Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone while my love is near me

I know it will be so until it’s time to go

So come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again

I have no fear of time

For who knows how my love grows?

And who knows where the time goes?

One of the underlying themes of my book is that unsustainability has arisen as an unintended consequences of our current cultural paradigm. For sustainability as flourishing to appear, the beliefs and norms that constitute that paradigm have to change. One of the critical beliefs to change is that of what it means to be human, from a picture of an individual as a consuming machine fulfilling a set of insatiable needs to a human whose existence is manifest by the satisfaction of a set of cares or concerns. One of the categories is care for the world which include most anything falling under the rubrics of environmentalism or greening. It has been a very hard sell to convert a technocratic, self protective response to unsustainability to one that comes from care. And where this is happening strange results are coming forth as described in the following articles.

It seems that acting out of one’s care for the world can trigger all sorts of adverse responses from family and friends who are not yet acting out of such concerns. People who tune in on family squabbles see a rise in breakdowns attributed to environmental activism and changes in behavior. Leslie Kaufman, writing in the NYTimes reports:

As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet… In households across the country, green lines are being drawn between those who insist on wild salmon and those who buy farmed, those who calculate their carbon footprint and those who remain indifferent to greenhouse gases… “As the focus on climate increases in the public’s mind, it can’t help but be a part of people’s planning about the future,” said Thomas Joseph Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore., who has a practice that focuses on environmental issues. “It touches every part of how they live: what they eat, whether they want to fly, what kind of vacation they want.” . . While no study has documented how frequent these clashes have become, therapists agree that the green issue can quickly become poisonous because it is so morally charged. Friends or family members who are not devoted to the environmental cause can become irritated by life choices they view as ostentatiously self-denying or politically correct.

I certainly do not advocate more strife, but this finding indicates that new values are showing up in changed behavior patters, and that is good for the cause of sustainability. But it also shows the depth of the existing cultural norms and beliefs and the high bar for change to occur. The difference in values shows up in public places as well. Another article by Stephen T. Asma in the Chronicle Review tells an interesting story:

Not too long ago, at a party, a friend confessed in a group conversation that he didn’t really recycle. It was as if his casual comment had sucked the air out of the room—I think the CD player even skipped. He suddenly became a pariah. A heretic had been detected among the orthodox flock. During the indignant tongue-lashing that followed, people’s faces twisted with moral outrage.

The author attributes this outcry to the a form of guilt closely related to the guilt that comes from religion and the self awareness of not living according to God’s rules. I think he goes a bit too far, but given the importance of creating awareness of the need for values that are driven by the demands from the Earth rather than those from the heavens, anything that works is OK.

Instead of religious sins plaguing our conscience, we now have the transgressions of leaving the water running, leaving the lights on, failing to recycle, and using plastic grocery bags instead of paper. In addition, the righteous pleasures of being more orthodox than your neighbor (in this case being more green) can still be had—the new heresies include failure to compost, or refusal to go organic. Vitriol that used to be reserved for Satan can now be discharged against evil corporate chief executives and drivers of gas-guzzling vehicles. Apocalyptic fear-mongering previously took the shape of repent or burn in hell, but now it is recycle or burn in the ozone hole. In fact, it is interesting the way environmentalism takes on the apocalyptic aspects of the traditional religious narrative. The idea that the end is nigh is quite central to traditional Christianity—it is a jolting wake-up call to get on the righteous path. And we find many environmentalists in a similarly earnest panic about climate change and global warming. There are also high priests of the new religion, with Al Gore (“the Goracle”) playing an especially prophetic role.

We even find parallels in environmentalism of the most extreme, self-flagellating forms of religious guilt. Nietzsche claims that religion has fostered guilt to such neurotic levels that some people feel culpable and apologetic about their very existence. Compare this with extreme conservationists who want to sacrifice themselves for trees and whales. And teachers, like myself, will attest to significant numbers of their students who feel that their cats or whatever are equal to human beings. And not only are members of the next generation egalitarian about all life, but they often feel positively awful about the way that their species has corrupted and defiled the whole beautiful symphony of nature. The planet, they feel, would be better off without us. We are not worthy. In this extreme form, one does not seek to reduce one’s carbon footprint so much as eliminate one’s very being.

Pointing out these parallels is not meant to diminish the environmental cause. We should indeed do the things in our power, and within reason, to sustain the planet. But we have a tendency to become neurotic and overly anxious, especially when we are regularly told, via green marketing ploys, that each one of us is responsible for the survival of the planet. That’s a heavy guilt trip.

I see a huge difference however. We have no way to discover why God has sent us a message about the way to live and about the perils of straying from that path. We can, however, begin to understand the more mundane messages the Earth is sending through science and our observations of how things are going. Our understanding of the behavior of complex systems provides an apocalyptic possibility without the slightest tinge of religious content. Not listening to these messages is not a sin, but it is an ostrich-like posture in the eyes of those who have come to believe action is critical. If these folks are able to invoke shame or guilt or any similar emotion in others, then I would see this more as a signal that the others are getting that message deep-down.

That’s a good sign and doesn’t need a philosopher or references to Nietzsche to explain what is happening. Anyway, the same notion of complexity suggests that each one of use is indeed responsible for the survival of the planet. Edward Lorenz gave us the important idea that the future in chaotic, complex systems could be dependent on a single seemingly insignificant act, giving a popular paper in 1972 titled, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” We don’t need to be driven by guilt; self-preservation and care will do.

The results of the Massachusetts Senatorial election are just in. The Republican, Scott Brown, trounced his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley by about 53% to 47%. This counts as a trouncing given the demographics of Massachusetts and the recent history of this seat. (Disclosure: I am a life-long Democratic voter.) I am disappointed by the results, but that is not what I want to write about.

This election demonstrates the complex nature of our political system, and the effects of rigidity on the dynamics of the system. The theory of democracy is that the majority rules unless the process would disenfranchise the minority. The founding fathers understood the resilience of this form of governance. They wanted to build a system that would not freeze up or become unstable, but that is exactly what is happening. It is what happens with complex systems in general. They work for long periods, but then some small event sends them reeling and pushes them into a new state of affairs.

This was the case with the recent financial collapse. Everything was hunky-dory for a decade or so, until the system broke down in what seemed like a mere second. Bubbles are just another name for the rigidity that can accumulate in a financial system. The solidity of capital that maintains the system gives way to paper assets, created by leveraging. Eventually the real metabolism starts to founder as the assets no longer carry the nutrients that are required to feed the system.

The financial system is critical to nurture the financial concerns of the society. When it fails, the sense of security, trust, and confidence that emerge from the healthy economy evaporate along with the real monetary wealth. The political system is equally critical to the health of the nation. When it is functioning in a resilient manner, the citizenry find security, trust, and confidence in non-financial domains that allow everyone to go about their business of life whatever it is. When it become rigid and fails to operate in the democratic way it was designed to do, those emergent qualities of security and trust go south. And that is where we appear to be heading.

This country cannot be neatly divided into two polities that oppose each other in a series of zero-sum games. We are a diverse citizenry with a broad spectrum of political and other values. But somehow, that is how the governance system has come to operate. The diversity of the real population has become replaced by a two-class distribution. The classic description of politics as the art of the possible or of compromise applies only with great difficulty to this situation. Responses to the great problems facing the nation become, as they have, polarized and what could be a pragmatic response, employing the smarts of all, ends up as narrowly constructed.

Worse, nothing happens at all, and that is where we seem to be heading. Burkean conservatives believe that this is a good situation assuming that the present is always going to be better than the future, especially if the government starts tinkering. But the world is so different from that of Burke’s time that this stance is difficult to justify. There are many serious issues that need remedy and concerted actions. Climate change, in spite of those in government who would deny its existence or seriousness, will continue to threaten us no matter how much we ignore it and take no actions to counter those threats. The fabric of the Nation rests on the rights established by the founders, which rights have become eroded in the face of terrorist activities and the inability to obtain decent medical care. Separate, but equal, in education was exposed as a fraud, so it is in the medical system.

It is hard to predict what impact this single election will have on the polity, but the difference of a few thousands of votes will be magnified by the rigidity already present. The danger is that the whole system ceases to operate. We have seen this happen when the government was shut down a few years ago, but fortunately without serious aftereffects. More is at stake here; I foresee that possibility that the whole country starts to shut down. It already has in a way with estimates of as much as 15% or more of the work force unemployed.

This country, unlike any other, was created on a moral foundation. Adherence to the moral base has been and must in my view continue to be an output of the body politic. It takes a resilient political and economic system that is working to do this. It behooves all those who claim positions of leadership in the country to restore and nurture the resiliency of the system even as they defend their own partisan positions. Hard to do, of course, but absolutely necessary.The inherent nature of complexity demands that it be this way. In many ways, this what had happened prior to the Civil War and forced Lincoln to act as he did. For those who ask what this has to do with sustainability, the answer is everything. Global sustainability requires that everything said here about the United States applies to global governance and economy. The complex system here in the US is nothing more than a smaller fractal of the global system.