One of the students in my course at Marlboro College posted a link to Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, a work from positive psychology containing a taxonomy of traits that connect to the "good life." The student suggested that these might form the basis for defining human flourishing. I agree. The authors describe the work as:

The classification is the result of a thorough study of the philosophies of the antiquities, the major world religions, the distinctions offered by historic and current social organizations. Twenty four specific strengths under six broad virtues consistently emerged across history and culture: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Each strength was thoroughly examined in its own chapter, with special attention given to its meaning, explanation, measurement, causes, correlates, consequences, and development across the life span, as well as to strategies for its deliberate cultivation.

The work is an antidote for the well known Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the authority used by practitioners to diagnose and treat all sorts of mental disorders.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States. It is intended to be applicable in a wide array of contexts and used by clinicians and researchers of many different orientations (e.g., biological, psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioral, interpersonal, family/systems).

Positive psychology seeks to discover what makes people's lives "good," as opposed to traditional psychology that deals primarily with conditions that interfere with one's fully functioning. The apposition of positive and traditional psychology is analogous to the anti-parallelism of sustainability and unsustainability. The single largest cost in the US in that for medical treatment, most of which is remedial. There is no specific economic category for producing the good life. It is all lumped into some measure of wealth or consumption. This belief system has produced little of the positive traits I will enumerate shortly, but has succeeded in threatening the current way of life and the planet as well. Our culture seems to prefer fixing problems after the fact rather than preventing them in the first place by design.

The six virtues, with a short definition, are:

1. Wisdom and Knowledge - Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge
2. Courage - Emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal
3. Humanity - Interpersonal strengths that involve tending and befriending others
4. Justice - Civic strengths that underlie healthy community life
5. Temperance - Strengths that protect against excess
6. Transcendence - Strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning

I won't stop and list all the character strengths that fill out the classification scheme, but here are the entries for wisdom and knowledge:

• Creativity [originality, ingenuity]: Thinking of novel and productive ways to conceptualize and do things; includes artistic achievement but is not limited to it.
• Curiosity [interest, novelty-seeking, openness to experience]: Taking an interest in ongoing experience for its own sake; finding subjects and topics fascinating; exploring and discovering.
• Judgment & Open-Mindedness [critical thinking]: Thinking things through and examining them from all sides; not jumping to conclusions; being able to change one's mind in light of evidence; weighing all evidence fairly.
• Love of Learning: Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one's own or formally; obviously related to the strength of curiosity but goes beyond it to describe the tendency to add systematically to what one knows.
• Perspective [wisdom]: Being able to provide wise counsel to others; having ways of looking at the world that make sense to oneself and to other people.

I have defined sustainability as the possibility of human [and all other life] flourishing, arguing further that the possibility depends on getting the whole socio-technical ecological system working in such a way that signs of flourishing become manifest more or less everywhere. In my book, I suggest one way of "defining" flourishing, that is, the satisfaction of a set of 11 canonical domains of concern, such as subsistence, family, or learning. There is a great deal of overlap between these and the above classification scheme.

In my recent teaching at Marlboro, I have presented the students with yet another scheme for determining how well a person is enjoying the good life. Based on the capabilities framework of Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum has developed a scheme with 10 capabilities necessary to build a fully functioning life upon. It is another way to describe a set of conditions that might be deemed "flourishing." A few of her categories are: life, bodily health, affiliation, and play. For the managers among us, it is critical to provide some metric enabling them to put any form of control or guidance system in play. Any of these three schemes or others would do that job, but that is not the essence of sustainability.

The challenge we all face is not the "management of Planet Earth," but figuring out how to make the system produce any of these constellations of properties constituting flourishing. The positive set of virtues is a good guide for knowing how we are doing, but has little value in guiding our collective journey into the future. I know little in detail about the science of positive psychology, but it seems to focus, not surprising, on the individual and on ways to intervene to create more well-being. Sustainability needs a "science" that looks outward at the world and discovers how to design the functioning of the cultural systems such that individual human beings live a fully functioning life.

The Walmart Sustainability Index project is one year old and the bloggers, and newsy sites are flying. It is clear from the news that the project has moved slower than Walmart's initial enthusiastic send-off heralded. I looked back at my own blog posts and see that I expressed at that time a good deal of skepticism that seems to be borne out a year later. It seems that even a company as large and powerful as Walmart can stumble a bit when taking on an issue as challenging as sustainability. But that's not surprising. The smarts that have made Walmart what it is are mostly not relevant or helpful when it comes to address sustainability.

Joel Makower has a good recap of what has happened and what has not during the past year. Some key points:

• The Sustainability Consortium formed to create the methodology has apparently dropped the idea of the index.
• The claims that connect the Index to sustainability have been muted.
• The questionnaires sent to all Walmart suppliers have not produced a revolution, nor have influenced customers habits.
• The promised transparency has yet to come.
• Life-cycle assessment or analysis (LCA) has jumped up as notch as a tool for product evaluation, but may suffer from the same hype that the Index did.

These comments should be read as a progress report, although some are indicators of the unpromising notions that Walmart started out with.

As I reported at the outset of the Walmart initiative, giving consumers better, but not necessarily more, information about the consequences of using any particular product is basically a good idea. The devil is, as always, in the details. The problems start with the name given to the index. The name should clearly identify what kind of information is to be provided. GoodGuide, another consumer information system that offers product scores has also muted their claims about the connection to sustainability, but still not enough. It is primarily a guide for people most interested in human health impacts, but is advertised as a sustainability rating system.

To call anything a sustainability index or a similar name is to mislead the public and yourself at the same time. It is misleading in the sense that it promises more than it can deliver. The scores are always based on a set of factors that relate to bad outcomes--toxicity, climate change potential, water use, etc. They are not tied to the factors that enable a system to sustain itself and keep producing the good outcomes we expect from it. I would not be so critical if these ratings were called something like an unsustainability index, and turned upside down so that zero was the best score. Admitting that every product in the marketplace produces some bad effects (zero is virtually impossible) is a marketer's nightmare, but it is the truth. Some smart PR firm would surely find a way to step over this barrier.

LCA methodologies, the primary method used to generate ratings, are complicated and extremely data intensive. They require human value judgments at several points along the way. LCA is not a "science" as claimed by the Sustainability Consortium. It is basically an accounting system with complicated rules for allocating the inputs and outputs associated with a product or service for each stage of its life cycle. Whatever science is involved comes in the factors that are used to calculate impacts. As a consequence, the result as expressed in the form of a single rating or score is arbitrary, and depends ultimately on the weights and value judgments used in the computational method.

Perhaps, this inherent characteristic of any "rating" system is behind the failure to expose the results of the survey of suppliers to the public. The data are useful, but only to technically trained personnel who know about all the warts in the methodology. The utility of LCA to a lay community, like consumers, as opposed to a technical community, rests on the transparency and credibility of the organization doing the work. The Walmart initiative has far to go toward this end. Nothing has changed in a year. Sustainability, as expressed in almost any terms, requires less consumption--a fact that gets buried in any of the rating systems. Buying goods that score high on a "sustainability" index makes the buyer feel good, but makes the world only a little less worse than otherwise. Sustainability may come, but only if and when we find a way different from material consumption to satisfy our concerns.

"Reluctance to Spend" This quote comes from an article in Newsweek arguing for a do-it-yourself economic recovery in the face of an incomplete government program. Counting on the market to offer enough incentives (t-shirts and smart phones) to sleeping consumers to get them back into the habit of buying with funds they do not have, the business sector is picked to be the best way out, sort of bootstrapping the recovery. Sounds good? Politically it appeals to the market champions. Economists love it, although many say this will not be enough to restart the growth dynamic.

Now think about this in the light of another recent article on Alternet that proclaims: "The Retirement Nightmare: Half of Americans Have Less Than $2,000 Banked for Their Golden Years." I found this shocking, especially in the implication that more current consumption is good for all of us. All that these people will have to subsist on is social security, which was never intended to provide for the necessaries of life much less the new toys that these retirees are also being told to rush out and buy. I don't have the demographic data at hand to do the numbers, but with our aging population trends, we are to become an deeply impoverished nation, by our current standards. I challenge any economist to rationalize this contradiction.

Other data show that many people are doing their own arithmetic and starting to reduce their debts, paying off mortgages and credits cards. The economic crunch seemed to have done what many thought it might--wake up the general public to that arithmetic reality that the piper would have to paid--sometime.

The real choice the typical consumer/citizen faces today is very tricky--an ipod today or a meal on the table after retirement. Or worse--no ipod today and a simpler meal than was eaten a few years ago as current income is used to pay down the debts that accumulated with easy credit and an incessant call to buy, buy, buy. . . .

The mathematical models that are used to set economic policy and to guide public and private investment and strategic choices do not incorporate the consequences of growth to all these people facing an uncertain future. Life may be OK for the affluent who can maintain a semblance, weak or strong, of their current lifestyle late in their years, but for increasing numbers the resultant polices are disastrous.

The situation is clearly unsustainable. I have been reading, with my class at Marlboro, about "progress without growth" and the idea of a steady-state economy. Neither connects well with the present world as the gulf between the policies and life styles today and a sustainable system is huge, and few bridges appear out of the murk of today's cloudy future. Any realistic attempt to build such bridges to a sustainable future are absolutely bound to cause pain, severe pain to many. Our political leaders everywhere are not doing their job as leaders, only as politicians. The faster we are told the truth about the numbers, the quicker we can respond to minimize the pain. We simply cannot have jobs, today, iPods in our pockets, and food on the table when we retire (that is, if we have jobs to retire from). I count myself as lucky at my rather advanced age, not having to think about or make these choices. But I worry more and more about the choices my children and their children are facing.

I was exposed to the perils of the arithmetic of growth when I was about 10 years old, but did not appreciate it--no surprise--when I saw Fantasia, the first film I ever watched (in the cinema of course). Now with the magic of Youtube you can also watch it. Take about 10 minutes to watch this wonderful tale about growth and its consequences. No economists were involved.

The industrial ecology conference is now in the past and I am at Marlboro College Graduate center teaching to the MBA for Managing Sustainability program. We have been reading Tim Jackson's book, Prosperity without Growth as the class text, adding a few ancillary articles. We're just at the point of discussing a steady-state economy (SSE)--what we mean by it, how critical is it, and how would we get there. The last two parts get all mixed together in the students' responses in class and in their answers on the assignments.

They have some trouble understanding what a SSE is. I do too. But that's not the point I want to make here. The challenge of transforming a modern economy to a SSE is immense. Every major institution within the political economy is designed to work on the basis of the expectation of continued growth. Stasis in monetary terms means economic death inside the neo-classical paradigm used to shape policy. What I have observed is that the enormity of the challenge leads to a not so subtle denial of the existential threat we are facing--that at least I and many other believe we are facing.

That threat is unlike the existential threat we all face in our own lives. Many die without ever facing the reality of the end of our lives. It comes upon us quietly in the night or abruptly on a street corner. But some have a change to undergo the transformation of death as a possibility sometime in the future to a reality now. This often happens after a diagnosis of cancer. What was only a theory is now staring you in the face and cannot be passed off for another conversation in the future. Some continue to deny what is happening, but many stop and take stock, and start to act on all those things that all of a sudden are the important ones, even if they are immensely difficult and had been put off and off.

The existential threat of the death of the Earth is very different. Even the idea of the death of the Earth is not the same. The Earth is not going to die for several billion years and, then, only when the Sun goes out. But it could die as a hospitable place for our species--a place where we flourish. But we can't think about it in the same way we can think about the death of a human--a reality we have lived with it from the time we became conscious beings.

So, that threat, the "death" of the Earth, can be nothing but a theory. We have never observed it, nor will we who are alive today. We can only deal with it as a metaphor to the way we handle the thought of our own death. Except as I noted in the cases when the threat, the possibility becomes a reality in the here and now, we deny the possibility one way or another. So it is with the death of the Earth. We deny it directly in the face of what A. N. Whitehead calls "irreducible and stubborn facts." We deny it indirectly, as my students tend to do, by arguing that any action today is fraught with so many barriers and uncertainties that action will be fruitless.

I don't believe we have the same choice, denial, we make in the case of our personal existential threat. We must act for the sake of our children, if not for the entire species. We cannot wait until we have the answers. The way we have found truth in the past is partly responsible for the problems of the present. Again following WHitehead and his colleague, William James, I believe we must act pragmatically, a word that has been in the air as we have dealt with other metaphorical deaths--the financial system. Put theory in the background for a time and start to try solutions that may seem impossible or have uncertain outcomes. Some will actually work. Most will not. But denial and inaction is bound to come up short. Unlike the short-term inevitability of biological death, it is quite possible that we can put off the "death" of the Earth for quite some time.

I am still attending the Industrial Ecology Gordon Research Conference and will be away pretty much until next Monday. The Conference rules do not allow blogging abut what is being discussed, but I am sure it is OK to talk about it in general terms. The idea of the Conferences is to facilitate open discussion of the latest research without attribution or specific reference so that the group can explore work in progress without fear of premature exposure.

I gave some of the details a few days ago. I guessed right about the tenor of the presentations and, so, have been pretty busy during the discussions. Like all professional gatherings most of the value comes from informal talk and seeing old friends. So is it here. I am more convinced than ever that we will make little progress toward sustainability until we clean up our language. A few of the blog posts I wrote just before coming were all about the importance of straight talk. These were more timely than I figured.

Here's his bottom line:

. . . [T]he literary world is still better [than the Internet] at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import."

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students. . . It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.

Same basic message as Judt's and mine. Words matter, and the medium through we we acquire and use them matters. All this "wonderful" new technology hasn't yet and may never do as good a job of cultivating the human beings we have the potential to grow into.

Only yesterday, I wrote about the shortcomings of technological communication systems. They may increase the number of links among people dramatically, but can only diminish the quality and authenticity of what passes over the links.

This morning I read an essay (registration required) by Tony Judt, entitled "Words" in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. While I will comment on a relevant part of the essay in a few moments, I must first note its poignancy. Judt, writing on the critical role words play in expressing our selves and our thoughts, has become increasingly disabled by a neurological disease, and is no longer able to express himself verbally in the way he writes about.

I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. . . No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. . . . If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

I know it is unseemly practice to crib too much from others when blogging, but today I will simply quote a few lines from Judt's essay as there is no way my words are up to the task. The main thrust of the essay is the importance of "articulacy, the way words are used, in public life.

In a world of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (not to mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—”I am what I buy”—brings impoverishment of its own. My children observe of their own generation that the communicative shorthand of their hardware has begun to seep into communication itself: “people talk like texts.”

This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.

Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion...”).

Judt eloquently refutes the conceit in Wright's column that the "single brain" evolving from burgeoning global networks will allow people to act together to counteract the natural tendency toward chaos in the world. If the medium is truly to become the message without regard to the words, no one will know what the message means and, then, what to do. Judt (and I) would agree with Wright that public utterances are critical to coordinated societal action, but without some conventions about what the words mean, the subsequent action would only increase the potential for chaos, not decrease it.

Robert Wright wrote a semi-facetious piece in the Times about how technology is gradually networking our cognitive functions on the way ultimately to produce one monster global brain. I found the article quite confused as it tries to make a critical argument against Nick Carr's concerns about the distractive power of technology into a loosely connected positive story about the coalescence of individual cognitive functions into one big brain.

Carr has written extensively on the distractive consequences of the heavy use of screens and other forms of information technology. Recent scientific surveys, particularly on young people (see my own reporting ), bear out the impacts. The Times earlier reported on the problems created in one family by incessant use IT devices. (Also see my related blog.)

Wright notes correctly that information technology has created linkage pathways between people that have never existed before. Arguing that these linkages enable humans to do things that they also have never been able to do (I think he is wrong here), Wright suggests that such technology is evolving in a Darwinian manner just as real living creatures are.

Maybe the essential thing about technological evolution is that it’s not about us. Maybe it’s about something bigger than us — maybe something big and wonderful, maybe something big and spooky, but in any event something really, really big.

Could it be that, in some sense, the point of evolution has been to create these social brains, and maybe even to weave them into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain?

Don’t get me wrong. I join other humans in considering human welfare — and the welfare of one human in particular — very important. But if we’re going to reconcile human flourishing with the march of technology, it might help to understand what technology is marching toward.

I think he has it completely backwards. Humans came first before technology, if only momentarily. Technology has been created to support flourishing, not the other way around. The word, technology, itself comes from a Greek word that refers to a creative act of a maker turning the world into an artifact full of meaning in human terms. There is a certain arrogance in giving supernatural form to something that man created. Wright should know all about this as he is the author of the recent book, The Story of God.

The tale continues: "I do think we ultimately have to embrace a superorganism of some kind — not because it’s inevitable, but because the alternative is worse." Without an all-encompassing technology, Wright says the world will turn into chaos for the lack of a system to coordinate all the people on earth. He has forgotten one terribly important factor here. We already do have such technology, language, and its derivative writing. Whatever the state of the world is today, it is not for lack of a coordinative technology.

While not mentioning this virtually universal tool, he suggests why he might have omitted it. It is not sufficiently efficient (his word) for the needs of "our" modern world. Without it, one cannot do all these critically (my word) important tasks in any hour: "1) check your e-mail and receive key input from a colleague as well as a lunch confirmation from a friend; 2) check Facebook and be led by a friend to an article that bears on your political passions, while also checking out the Web site of a group that harnesses that passion, giving you a channel for activism; 3) and, yes, waste some time reading or watching something frivolous." What on Earth does efficiency have to do with flourishing.

In any case, so what. If this is the argument for the benefits of a single global brain, I am not the least bit convinced. Technology may help the human species "flourish," as Wright writes, but what kind of life is that likely to be. Certainly not the life that Albert Borgmann writes about, or that Wendell Berry, or William Blake, or a myriad of artists and humanists find unique about our species, and that Wright seems not only to miss but obliquely dis.

Wright ends with a reference to a new work about to come out by Kevin Kelly of Wired fame, who writes about this new brain-building technology: “stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves” and asks, “How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?” Maybe we cannot but be stirred, but this in itself does not make what is happening either good or bad for us. This possibility and its consequences in terms of how we deal with the continuing evolution of this technology is missing in this discussion. Without it, this discussion is nothing but a few technophiles' ramblings.

I'm getting ready to go off for a week to New Hampshire to attend this year's Gordon Research Conference on Industrial Ecology. I always find it somewhat of a drag to pick up and leave our place on the Maine Coast at the peak of the summer. But the last few days have not been the best. Global warming is certainly coming, judging from the intense heat of the last few days even here right on the coast. This year the focus of the Conference is on design--a subject I am always keenly interested in.

As one of the first persons to work within this still very young academic discipline, I find this focus most welcome. It reflects a maturation and acceptance that the ideas that have evolved over about 20 years are worth putting into practice. Some have already, but mostly unnoticed and not explicitly tied to the field. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the subject, industrial ecology is founded on the idea that natural systems display many of the characteristics we associate with sustainability, and it follows without a lot of thought that we might use knowledge based on these systems to design the socio-economic systems that we live by and in. One of the central ideas is the closing of material loops, in other words, changing our current mostly once-through material economy to one built on intertwined closed loops.

Another important outgrowth of the closed loop concept is life cycle thinking and analysis. Again this simply means that the environmental impact of any artifact must be measured over the entire life cycle from resources extraction through manufacture, distribution, use, and, finally, end-of-life processing. Much of the research in the field has gone into developing tools for life cycle analysis. Life cycle tools have been almost certainly used in some form or another any time green or sustainable something is discussed. The tool is the primary means of determining whether one artifact is less impactful than another. The results of such analyses get backed into the design process in some cases and then are used deliberately to produce new products and services that are greener or more sustainable by the common use of the word.

If these analyses are done carefully and interpreted carefully, the products that emerge will be less harmful than their predecessor, and may contribute to making the globe less unsustainable. These analyses do not tell the whole story, however. No life cycle analysis scheme I know of takes into account the rebound effect which roughly is an increase in consumption produced by the higher eco-efficiency of green products. So unless particular attention is paid to how the excess money is used, gains in greening will be overtaking by economic growth. Eco-efficiency and greening are not exactly the same thing. Eco-efficiency promises more value in economic terms for less impact. Green products often cost more for the same value or functionality.

Those who follow my work know I do not agree with this use of sustainable, and believe it is little more than a subtle form of greenwashing, suggesting that something is sustainable all by itself. But I didn't intend to take much space here to discuss this; I'll wait until I get to the Gordon Conference next week. About half the presentations have sustainable in the title so I expect to be very busy during the discussion. I get the last word as I am part of the closing panel. More later from New Hampshire.

Being an American on the Fourth, I can't but think about the symbolism and meaning of our Independence Day. Two things come to mind: one is historic and one is contemporary. The historic dwells on the meaning of independence. 234 years ago, it was a call for freedom from the domination of a hegemonic nation. Along with the reaction to the British tyranny felt by the people as a whole, the colonists expressed a new kind individual freedom with its roots in the very spirit of being human. That spirit, as expressed in a myriad of journalistic pieces celebrating this day, has propelled the US to an unparalleled place in the modern world, long the envy of other nations aspiring to the material and existential richness available to most of our citizens.

But while the spirit may still exist, the world has changed dramatically. In the simplest of terms, it has become too small to accommodate today's demands on both humans and the world itself. This is the backdrop to the concerns about sustainability that are now juxtaposed against these demands for more and more. We must ask ourselves whether the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence are literally true for us today. Science has brought us much knowledge about how the world, including the human species, works, and has spawned the many technological marvels of modernity. The cost of that kind of knowledge, however, comes in a diminishing of our understanding of how the world really does work.

We still believe as a society that freedom and choice are one and the same, but fail to see the connections between one person's choices and others' freedom and well-being. The connection may have been of no or little consequence in 1776. Today we have begun to appreciate and elevate the recognition that we are all connected not only to one another but also to the world that supports our very being. That we have forgotten or never learned this "irreducible and stubborn fact" (A. N. Whitehead) is all too evident in the inequalities present and growing in the US, and in the pressure put on the planetary system to the point where that engine of life sputters and threatens to stop working.

Is anyone really free when so many on the Earth cling precariously to life? In the terms I use to define sustainability, can anyone flourish when others, considering all life, do not. Can I flourish at the same time my (yes, my) actions destroy a large and once vibrant Gulf of Mexico and all the life that was to found there? Can our Nation survive yet another attempt at ripping it asunder as our current political talk suggests? We can all arise to the occasion of the Fourth by making sure that whenever we express our freedom through the choices we make that we acknowledge that we are bound to everyone and everything affected by our actions. We can no longer act as if we have the independence to do act as we please.

The second thought I have today is related to the first. Recently, I read several pieces commenting on the country's mood, which is generally down in the mouth. People are looking to "get their life back." But what if the old way of life cannot be sustained in spite of the great spirit of America. We seem both on a collective and individual sense, to be ignoring the understanding I mentioned above that we are all connected in the wonderful, but complex Earth system. What I do no longer remains an isolated action leaving the rest of the system more or less in the same state. Like Lorenz's butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil and setting off a tornado in Texas?, my purchase of a latte in Brunswick, Maine has an impact on the lives of farmers in South America and on the forests there.

Getting my life back presupposes that the old way was sustainable except for something that was not working but could be fixed. A stimulus here and there to get the economy rolling so everyone could exercise all those choices. A little tax (maybe) here and there to shift consumption towards a greener state. Companies that would keep me on the job my whole life. All of these and other wishes certainly have merit, but fail to acknowledge that the world of the prior "good" life just isn't around any more and, even if it ever was, couldn't have kept producing the life that we thought was due to us as an inalienable right. We all must learn to rethink the Declaration of Independence in the context of a finite, complex world and stop reaching back for the good life. The challenge of sustainability lies ahead: to redefine critical terms, like freedom, happiness, or flourishing in new ways, ways that bring forth the human spirit but in keeping with our unfolding understanding of how the world really works.

Do you feel a certain emptiness in your life. Are there moments when you have absolutely nothing to do? Do you find yourself have to go constantly--anywhere on line? Have you been using the other remedy, the old-fashioned book to occupy your precious time. If you have any of these ailments, there is a new treatment available to you.

Ask your device doctor about the new miracle cure for all that ails you: the iPadberrydroidle, approved for use by people of all ages by the FDA, the Foolish Device Administration.

Certain rare side effects such as boredom, continuous partial attention, traffic accidents, and other results of competing devices may occur. Stop using the iPadberrydroidle immediately if any of these should occur. Do not use the device in the shower or take it outside in the rain. Loss of function may occur. Don’t tweet if you are texting, linking in, or facebooking. Do not use if you suffer from occasional device withdrawal pangs or pains. Tell your doctor if you have other symptoms of withdrawal including unexplained bouts of crying or moments of panic. Tell your doctor if you keep exchanging your weekly allowance or food stamp allotment for another iPadberrydroidle. Tell your doctor if you start growing a second pair of hands to hold multiple devices. This is a very rare but serious side effect. If you observe any signs of irregular bumps appearing around your wrists, immediately stop using the device.

Finally, the answer is there for you who have suffered so long. You can now avoid having to push your granddaughter’s swing and aggravate your arthritic back. Just text her every four hours to let her know you are there for her. But tell your doctor if you develop overactive thumb muscles.

You can be at your daughter’s wedding without fear of erratic bladder disorder (EBD). Not actually present at the ceremony, of course, but watching on the screen of your iPadberrydroidle while you send a stream of loving messages to hers, placed out of sight in the special corsage she is carrying.

Make sure you do ask your device doctor next time you visit the iPadberrydroidle service counter at your nearest store. Appointments not necessary, but recommended.

[Are you as sick of all those obnoxious drug and medical device ads as I am?]

Last night, our long standing (about 35 years) couples book club met. We usually read a work of fiction, but this time we read a short "memoir" of Leo Tolstoy, [A] Confession. Our book chooser for the occasion had been moved by the recent film of Tolstoy's later life, "The Last Station." In Confession, written in his 51st year, following his greatest literary successes, Tolstoy describes his existential battle with uncertainty about the meaning of life. Asking himself this question, "What Is the meaning of life?", Tolstoy could not come up with a satisfactory answer that he could use to justify his own existence, and seriously flirted with suicide.

Eventually he changed his mind, and discovered a positive reason for his existence. First he had to recognize that he had been asking the wrong question. He had been asking abut the meaning of his life, but then realized that this was not the same question as asking about the meaning of life in general, for everyone alive in the past, present, and future. He saw the peasants (Russia, then, was sharply divided between the peasants and everyone else.) spending their lives successfully, without suffering the pangs of not knowing explicitly the answer to his question, but living as if they did indeed know. He attributed their success to a faith in existence tucked within the vastness of the infinite universe. Once accepting the infinitude of the cosmos against the finiteness of one's own life, one can stop looking for answers and live on the basis of that faith alone. Now with a faith of his own, he was able to rejoin the world he had been shunning.

Not through the sense of religious faith, however. Tolstoy, who began his life with an unexceptional immersion in the Orthodox religion was disappointed and disenchanted with the answers he got from church officials, theologians, and other scholars. After an extended period of silence following the publication of this book, Tolstoy turned to writing again, but shifted his fictional focus to the lives of ordinary people, and toward the mystical. His unorthodox view of faith was not acceptable to the organized church and Tolstoy was eventually excommunicated.

Coming back from our book club, I started thinking about our conversations about the book, especially the parts touching on Tolstoy's distinction between the finite and the infinite. Somehow, I sensed a connection between his journey and my own quest to find the meaning of sustainability. Remember that I define sustainability as the possibility that all life will flourish on the planet forever. I have often been challenged on my use of forever as failing to reflect our awareness of the initial appearance of life on Earth nor the expectation that our home will disintegrate in a few billion years hence.

I usually argue that forever, as it is used here, is just a metaphor for a very long time. Tolstoy's pondering makes me think of another reason why it is important to include forever, that is, infinity in the temporal dimension of the universe. If we think only in terms of our own lives, then like Tolstoy's discovery, there is no reason to justify our existence. But in the context of the mystery of the infinite, sustainability is fundamentally an expression of faith that we exist in an infinite cosmos whose expanse harbors whatever reasons we might find for existence.

And although we expect to disappear a long time from now, short of a vast migration to another hospitable planet, we can, and I believe should, celebrate the mystery of our existence. We should strive to keep our world going, and to live our lives fully within it, as did the faithful peasants of Tolstoy, even though we would say they lacked much of what we deem necessary for flourishing. If we think as most do today that sustainability means only to keep things from collapsing in the present or near future, we will be unable to answer anyone who asks "Why should we?" except as some statement of our hubris.

I now know more clearly why I always criticize this common use of sustainable. Sustainability requires that we get beyond all of the arguments made on the basis of the finite, the known world, formulae, positive knowledge, and so on, and open up to the possibility of the infinite and the mystery that life is and always will be. Then, it makes sense to conduct our individual lives so that all life will flourish on the planet forever. In the meantime, we seem to living as did Tolstoy before his epiphany, coming close to suicide.

A small story in today's NYTimes would perhaps be unnoticed in quiet times, but coming soon after the Gulf Blow-out, it merits attention. A Waltham, Massachusetts genetic engineering company announced that they are in the later stages of approval for a genetically modified salmon species that will grow to maturity in farms in half the time of an ordinary breed. In writing this last sentence I struggle to know what to call the unmodified salmon. Natural, no, the salmon raised in farms come from a line that has forgotten what it is to live in the wild. Wild, no, at least not along the Eastern seaboard. So many farmed salmons have escaped and interbred that the original Atlantic salmon is endangered and rare, if it exists at all now. A similar situation occurs along the Pacific coast.

The laboratory scientists developed the new species by injecting DNA from a Chinook salmon and a genetic switch from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon, to activate the Chinook gene in the cold temperatures where the salmon would be farmed. This would allow the fish to grow all year round, accounting for the shorter time to full size, at which point they can be harvested and sold. These "engineers" claim the fish will be indistinguishable from "ordinary" salmon in every characteristic of importance to people eating the fish.

Without further comment here about genetic modification in general, I am most concerned about the following sentence fro the story

Mr. Stotish said the salmon would be grown only in inland tanks or other contained facilities, not in ocean pens where they might escape into the wild. And the fish would all be female and sterile, making it impossible for them to mate.

I have been using the black swan metaphor of Nassim Taleb to talk about the possibility of "impossible" events, with regard to the Gulf blowout. Fish farmers have not been the most careful of operators, and his statement gives little assurance that these fish would not be grown under circumstances that lead to their escaping into the ocean. I am not aware of the inspection and monitoring procedures for fish farming, but I suspect they are not great. And we have little knowledge or control of practices outside of the US. I picture the emergence of a "black" salmon phenomenon here when something happens to surprise us in a situation where what happens could not have happened. Having the FDA as the agency in charge of this process gives me little solace that we will ever be prepared for the consequences of being wrong.

I have found it difficult to write for my blog this week. Maybe it’s because the good weather outside of our Maine cottage beckons or maybe I am a bit depressed by everything going on these days. I’m still thinking about the implications of the Gulf spill. In spite of the zillions of words written about it the situation seems pretty stark and can be largely captured by just a few sentences.

1. It’s crazy to drill for oil in places where a blowout, however unlikely, would cause great harm.

2. It’s crazy to let companies like BP or any other operate without constant monitoring. No matter how well meaning they are, they operate out of the wrong mindset, believing that they are in control. It’s just the way technology-based companies always act.

3. It’s crazy to assume that anyone can understand all the things that can go wrong even with the most sophisticated computers available. Complex systems like the oil exploration rig sitting on the surface of the sea attached by a pipe to the bottom of that sea with a crew of human operators in charge running a system designed by other human beings always have behavior possibilities the models can’t predict.

4. It’s crazy to believe what anyone says in the aftermath of a major accident. Maybe it’s best to act like Chicken Little and assume the sky is falling and act accordingly.

5. It’s crazy to expect that things will return to the same normalcy as before the accident. Once complex system jump into a new regime, they are likely to stay there in spite of massive efforts to return to the old state.

6. It’s crazy to seek the responsible parties that caused the disaster. Complex systems fail as systems, not because any single person does a bad thing. Maybe someone can be found to be a trigger, but it is always the system that fails. If anyone is to be made responsible it is the one that decided to drill in the first place, or allowed the company to drill. Once the system was in place, its failure cannot be attributed to a single action. Did the o-rings cause the Challenger accident or was it the decision to launch that day or…?

7. It’s crazy to believe that anyone in government or elsewhere can now design or permit or operate such a system that is, using the phrase of the day, too big to fail. It’s not that they are materially too big to fail (it’s just the opposite; they are already complex and intrinsically capable of unforeseen malfunctions), it is that the consequences of failure are too much for the world or whatever is impacted to bear. After systems become complex, they are always prone to unexpected failures. The only way to avoid the possibility of failures is not to build the systems in the first place or to keep them simple enough that they are understandable by humans as well as computers.

8. It’s crazy to assume we know what to do when a Katrina or Gulf blowout happens. Everything else about the blowout sends a message that we don’t really know what to do when an event like this happens. Fixing a complex system is itself a complex task. All the plans cannot anticipate the reality that has to be faced. Find somebody responsible for the messes involved in cleaning up is as futile as finding the one who caused the accident. The line between incompetence and simply being at the mercy of the system is very fine.

9. It’s crazy to believe that we can put a price on nature and on human suffering.

With a few changes in the wording, you can describe the collapse of any complex system in these same terms. Instead of oil exploration and BP, substitute Lehman Brothers and the financial system. Nassim Taleb, who I wrote about in a recent blog, says many of these same things in his ten rules for dealing with black swans, his metaphor for rare, but disastrous, events like the blowout.

Sustainability, as manifest by flourishing, involves rebuilding the world socio-economic system which is now too big to fail, in the sense that it is so big that we, the world, cannot afford to let it collapse or undergo a major regime change (to use another phrase of the moment). If that were to happen, all of our established institutions and systems for taking care of ourselves would likely fail or become ineffective. Unlike the recent economic collapse, there is no Treasury or Federal Reserve to start up the printing presses and pour money into the system. Attempts at averting a regime change in the global climate system and the subsequent impacts illustrate what happens when nobody can metaphorically print money to prime the pump. Basically, nothing happens. There is so much to learn from the financial collapse and the blowout that can move the possibility of sustainability up a notch, but gets lost in the the rush to assign blame and find the quick fix.

My last post drew upon an article in Greenbiz by Nathan Shedroff. Nathan wrote me to ask why I had disagreed with him. The issue is sufficiently complex that I want to devote another post to it. I have copied the guts of Nathan's rejoinder. Part of my response was a reaction to the "funny" headline in Greenbiz, but that's not the real reason.

John, I don't understand your point or why you disagree with me that sustainability should be an accepted and assumed "given" in how we do business instead of, still, a question to ponder. I never stated that business is doing all they can or knows all they need--quite to the contrary. What I tried to describe is that organizations of all types have what they need at their disposal to start moving in a more sustainable direction--and even have a significant, positive affect--but simply aren't yet. They lack the will, not the knowledge to act upon. And, they shouldn't. What I'm tired of is convincing business leaders that sustainability is a successful strategy that is in their own best interests. I'm tired of seeing supposedly smart people shown the obvious by leading experts only to have them discount it or waffle simply because it wasn't taught to them in business school.

I see I do need to clarify my response. I agree with Nathan that sustainability is such a serious matter that it should not be necessary to cajole companies into action. The issue revolves around what is meant by sustainability and what kinds of action? My disagreement is that firms (and just about everyone else) do not know what sustainability means, and so they cannot take the requisite steps. What Nathan is talking about are actions to reduce the impacts that firms make in the production and marketing of their offerings and in the use of those offerings by their customers. I am always careful to speak about such actions as reducing unsustainability, and it is critical to do it. But these kinds of actions cannot produce sustainability, which means that the earth's environmental and social systems have attained a level of homeostasis that permits all life to flourish.

As long as we are depleting our resources, we must ultimately rely on innovation and technology to compensate for the negative changes in the Earth's systems. Maybe we can achieve this end for materials, but not for fossil energy sources. When all the oil, gas, and uranium is gone, we will have only energy from the Sun to support us. Companies that continue to ignore this limit to social life on Earth do not know, contrary to Nathan's claim, what sustainability is and need to be educated and cajoled or more than cajoled into changing and deepening their understanding.

It is a serious misuse of the terms, sustainable or sustainability, to connect them with improvements in the environmental or social performance of firms. Their efforts toward this end will be inevitably thwarted by growth and thermodynamics. And by believing they are doing the "right" thing, they will only make matters worse in the long run. Nathan does understand that consumerism must end, but how can that happen when firms survive today only by feeding the consumers' hungry mouths, and where growth is a central foundation for the success of a firm and the economy of which it is a part?

By all means, there is a difference between being "more sustainable" (which is what I was discussing) and being 100% sustainable (which, I'm not sure we can even ever achieve). But, this is simply a matter of degree. Surly, you're not arguing that organizations and individuals should do nothing in this regard until they can leap to 100% sustainability on the planet? We can't (as individuals, organizations, or societies) move from where we are to "absolutely sustainable in every way" without moving through "more sustainable." If a jump from where we are to the ideal is the only acceptable path then it is a path that will never be taken by 99% of humanity.

As I have just written, sustainability is not "simply a matter of degree." Sustainability means getting the whole system back to a state where it can function to produce flourishing. It is all or nothing. We will attain a state where life can continue to flourish or not. It will take structural and cultural change, far beyond the reductions of impacts that Nathan and all others talk about when addressing sustainability. Business will have to be a major, but not sole actor, in bringing about such changes. If they focus only on using the conventional tools and strategic devices for "sustainability" that have been currently accepted as "state of the art," they will not only be disappointed in the results but will continue to point us in the wrong direction.

I would not disagree if Nathan and others would re-label the efforts they now associate with sustainability to something like reducing unsustainability. I know that's a mouthful and not easy to market, but it is what they are doing, and should continue to do with any more cajoling.

Nathan does neat things with design.