The Right Way to Flourish - John R. Ehrenfeld

Telling It Like It Is

December 30, 2008No Comments

Bob Herbert, without mentioning the word sustainability, has a great year-end message. What he proposes is a step in that direction. > I’ve got a new year’s resolution and a new slogan for the country. > The resolution may be difficult, but it’s essential. Americans must resolve to be smarter going forward than we have been for the past several years. > Look around you. We have behaved in ways that were incredibly, astonishingly and embarrassingly stupid for much too long. We’ve wrecked the economy and mortgaged the future of generations yet unborn. We don’t even know if we’ll have… Read More

Outsmarting Evolution

December 28, 2008No Comments

As human beings, we are like other living creatures, the product of evolution. Whatever we have become, we are the end of myriad adaptations. Language was perhaps the most important evolutionary innovation in our phylogenetic history. With the tool of language and our cognitive skills we have produced technology that has brought us up to and into the modern age. With all its wonders, technology exacts a cost–the loss of our innate humanity–all the attributes that make us so different from the complex machines that increasingly come to dominate our lives. Now comes a new technological threat– the use of… Read More

Taking a Break

December 23, 2008No Comments

I’m off for a while. See you next year.

Is It Too Late?

December 21, 2008No Comments

Starting to write this post triggered some seasonal thoughts. Winter has come to New England. The snow has been coming down for a couple of days with only a few hours of respite. A few towns only about 20 miles away have been without power for over a week, victims of the last big ice storm. More cardinals than ever are feeding outside the kitchen window. I am thankful that we have no place to go today other than outside to shovel. The beauty and travail, all mixed up in this storm, remind me that sustainability is not some thing, but only a possibility that always shows up amidst a changing world. Change is not something to avoid or oppose, but to understand. We must build and govern our social, technological, and economic system so that they do not collapse or move into regimes where that possibility recedes or even disappears. But then. . .

Design for Sustainable Behaviour

December 21, 2008No Comments

WorldChanging posted an item about, “Designing Products for Sustainable Use.” While noting the usual suspects in the area of green design, it spoke about design going beyond the usual thems of recyclability, organic, etc. Dan Lockton, a Ph. D. student at Brunel University in London, is working on a theory of “Design with Intent,” an approach that builds in a strategy into artifactual design that will produce an intentional behavior by the user. It very encouraging to find that this design approach central to attaining sustainability in my book is showing up in schools of engineering and design. . .

Business Still Doesn’t Get It

December 21, 2008No Comments

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development has just issued a report, entitled, Sustainable Consumption: Facts and trends from a business perspective.
In announcing the report, the WBCSD admits that “the report says current global consumption patterns are unsustainable.” The gist of the announcement and the report is that world business is going to take the lead in rectifying this situation. . .

Technology, Community, and Sustainability

December 20, 2008No Comments

Community is a positive value in any transformational path towards sustainability. It stands out in opposition to individualism and to the sense of oneself as an isolated ego. Technology is painted in my book as one of the root causes of unsustainability because it tends to create an addiction to finding technological solutions to everything in the world—from self satisfaction to solving the global warming challenge. But both of these concepts can work as effective teammates towards winning sustainability if the processes by which technology is created and selected for application move from isolated expert-driven choices toward community-based decision processes. . .

Ponzi, Madoff, and Sustainability

December 17, 2008No Comments

Tom Friedman wrote today about the ethical void that popped out of the revelations of Bernard Madoff’s colossal Ponzi scheme.

The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don’t want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism — but I don’t want to be eaten by them either.

Pot Pourri 12/14/2008

December 14, 2008No Comments

Sustainability seemed to fade a bit this week, in spite of the so-called good news about the apparent drop in consumer spending. The news media and the blogs were full of contradictory pronouncements as to whether the data indicated a change of values or, more directly, emptier pocketbooks and credit lines. The off-and-on-again bailout of Detroit will take a lot of money that might better go to transforming our relationship to the automobile. It is not just jobs that we would be preserving, but an old, outmoded form of mobility. A better policy would be some sort of transition project that would both retrain the displaced workers and invest in alternative forms of transit. Once the politics of the bailout are settled, I am afraid the long-term problem that remains will become forgotten until the next crisis. . .

Whopper or Big Mac?–Taste Testing in the Wild

December 10, 20081 Comment

As the Holidays approach, I seem to be more like the Grinch every day. I guess I am looking for trouble when I read the newspaper, surf the internet, or listen to the boob tube. What astounds me is how easy it is to find it. Trouble to me is evidence of the utter blindness and deafness of the effects of our culture on everything from the climate to the size of our waistlines. And not just our waistlines, but those of other cultures, probably still pretty skinny because they have yet to adopt our eating habits.