Creative collaboration for championing sustainability
On February 8th we hosted our second Championing Sustainability creative forum. A dynamic and diverse group of 50 participants came and engaged with opennes and passion in the creative exploration of what sustainability means to them. Through this process they sought to design strategies that would translate their personal and shared visions into action. Bringing people together not only to learn what we already know (what is) but also to create new knowledge and insights about possibilities yet to be created (what could be) is a core aspect of what we do at Syntony Quest. Ours is a work of gardening: we seek to provide fertile ground, sunlight, air but participants bring the seeds... which we water and help grow together with them.
This creative forum took place at the ArtHouse in San Francisco, providing a wonderful venue for collaborative work. As social systems designers, we understand that the container flavors the contained. If we are looking for creativity and breakthrough thinking, we need collaborative learning environments that create the conditions for inspired interaction. With its mobile whiteboards and flexibility to allow for a variety of group activities, the ArtHouse allowed this to be more of a creative playshop than a managerial workshop. Of course, there are so many ways to doing this: from providing access to nature, to creating hospitable space (achieved through such processes as the conversation methodology of the World Café), to simply having playful and creative tools to facilitate engagement. But the most important element for a creative forum is to focus on questions and ideas at the heart of people's care.
Integral responses to the complexity of contemporary global and local challenges – at personal, organizational, and planetary levels – require an expanded perspective and, in truth, an expansion of consciousness: a way of recognizing interconnections, of perceiving wholes and parts, of acknowledging processes and structures, of blending apparent opposites, and of actively, purposefully, intentionally flowing harmonies. In short, they require conscious and informed collaboration. Individual solutions and innovative ideas are necessary but not sufficient. Real opportunity to affect change arises from the systemic synergies we create together. The Club of Rome coined the term "global problematique" to describe the complex entanglement of the collective challenges faced by humanity at any given point in time. It is our task to create what our colleague Ricardo Rodriguez Ulloa from the Instituto Andino de Sistemas in Peru calls the "solutionatiques" – systems of shared solutions that arise from the genius of each person. To do so, we need to create an ecology of new ways of working, learning and living that embody social and environmental integrity. In short, we must learn to design systems of syntony.
At the end of the Championing Sustainability forum the room was abuzz with the vibrant energy generated by the convergence of emotions and ideas around what is possible. Individual and collective self-directed sustainable development no longer seemed an abstract idea or lofty goal. In fact, it had become a necessary engagement - not an objective or destination, but a vital journey of life-affirming, future-creating, and opportunity-increasing change leadership. After a day like this, our optimism was grounded in the richness and depth of the networks of conversations conceived through our interactions with the power to transform and create new realities. Championing sustainability was made real.
Kathia & Alexander Laszlo
Syntony Quest
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Reader Comments (1)
You say on your web site that "SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT no longer seemed an abstract idea or a lofty goal." ----- while I believe that "SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT" as it is usually contstrued is impossible.
I am setting my sites on long-term CONTRACTION away from OVERSHOOT and toward sustainability.
I have just watched an excellent slide show entitled 'WORLD FOOD AND HUMAN POPUATION GROWTH' at:
http://www.panearth.org/panearth/world%20food%20&%20human%20population%20growth/player.html
I am circulating this slide show to the widest audience possible.
ALSO --- I hope you will find some interest in the two URL web sites that I have been circulating for the last couple of weeks. I will paste (below) the MESSAGE I have been circulating to various recipients WITHOUT ALTERATION.
Comments, suggestions and/or criticisms of my ideas are most welcome.
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UNALTERED MESSAGE BEGINS
Please forward this message and its attached PDF to the electronic mail boxes of members of your organization who may be interested in dealing with the basic cause of the imbalance between humans and their supporting ecosystems -- as opposed to concentrating on the symptoms of this imbalance.
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I encourage you to read the material below - including the two (2) URL web sites provided, and I encourage you to make use of the ideas present as you see fit.
Please contact me by return email if you are confused by anything I have written and/or if you wish to have further clarification of the ideas presented.
NOTE that the CULTURE CHANGE web site leads to a second essay based on a peer reviewed journal paper -
AND NOTE ALSO that the 'Relocalize' web site, operated by the POST CARBON INSTITUTE has the original journal paper and three (3) relevant book reviews attached to it.
The material presented deals with the novel thesis that AGRICULTURE, not just modern industrial fossil-fuelled agriculture, has been unsustainable since its adoption 10,000 years ago --- and that it follows that:
IF "AGRICULTURE, not just modern industrial fossil fuelled agriculture, has been unsustainable since its adoption 10,000 years ago" then the global human population has been in overshoot of the carrying capacity of its supporting ecosystems since the abandonment of hunter gathering and the adoption of farming.
Many of us have finally understood the dilemma faced by humanity in the context of the depletion of the fossil fuel energy subsidies upon which modern complex societies are dependent, however I have finally come to understand a more serious and basic resource depletion that has been looming over us during most of the run up to the present global human population of 6.5 billion ---- please see the development of this thesis in the two essays that have just been posted on the CULTURE CHANGE web site at:
http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=154&Itemid=2#cont
Also you may find some interest in the following email message I been sending to various creative colleagues during the past week or so.
The message entitled 'SCIENCE AND MEDIA AVOID THE MAIN ISSUE'(below) features another version of the same ideas at another URL web site operated by the POST CARBON INSTITUTE.
Peter Salonius
Research Scientist
Natural Resources Canada
Fredericton, New Brunswick
Day time (WORK) Phone (506) 452-3548
Home phone (506) 459-6663
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SCIENCE AND MEDIA AVOID THE MAIN ISSUE
My reason for sending this email has to do with your authorship on articles/papers/films/letters to editors concerning (usually unsustainable) aspects of interactions between our species and the ecosystems upon which we rely for life support. In most of the items I have read/seen the issue of remedial measures, to relieve the environmental pressure/damage caused by human numbers, is given short shrift --
- and in some cases we see writers and thinkers actually interested in further demographic and economic expansion, in apparent denial of the finite nature of the planet Earth and its resources.
We have generally concerned ourselves with individual aspects/areas of the imbalance between humans and their supporting ecosystems -
- however we very seldom stand back and assess the major drivers of this imbalance // and in the few instances that we do stand back to assess these drivers, we resist the temptation to suggest remedies to policy makers that involve reshaping the direction of human society -or- we are told by peers, employers, reviewers or editors to stick to individual issues and leave social organization to policy makers and politicians. The enormity of required solutions usually makes it less stressful to get back to picking away at the easier digested symptoms of the global human dilemma that can be addressed by reductionism.
In 1999 I published an appeal (CONSERVATION BIOLOGY 13(6): 1518-1519) that scientists consider spending a considerable portion of their efforts to educate policy makers "about the diminishing ability of the biosphere to withstand the onslaught of exponential human population and economic growth."
In 1999 I thought that measures "to stabilize or slowly reduce population numbers" would suffice. I am now convinced that we will have to orchestrate Rapid Population Decline -or- have such a decline imposed upon us by resource depletion realities.
Most of us agree that the human experiment, which is now the size of the Earth, has gone terribly wrong. At issue is the point at which humanity took the unsustainable fork in the road -and- what we must do to get back on track. There is a growing realization that human numbers will decrease, either by planned contraction or by the development of various scarcities.
My 'vision' includes allowing the functional integrity terrestrial (and aquatic) communities begin to reestablish by ceasing to stage manage ecosystems. This reliance on self-organizing/self managing systems, that evolution has already created, would feed a very small number of humans sustainably - if they regulated their exploitation/harvesting activities to fall within the (now better understood) capacity of their supporting ecosystems to maintain critical breeding populations, species and structural diversity, to replace soil lost by erosion and to replace soluble plant nutrients lost by harvest export or leaching.
In fisheries, because they represent such as small fraction of the global human diet, a return to sustainably harvesting wild populations would not cause widespread starvation.
In forestry a shift, to alternate harvesting systems that accommodate the time requirement for full species and structural restoration, and that approximate natural disturbance dynamics - as opposed to creating ecosystem simplifying product driven species assemblages - could be initiated very quickly.
The abandonment of agriculture in favour of the re-establishment of self-managing, native, nutrient conservative forest and grassland/prairie ecosystems would require much more time because these unmanaged systems can not produce enough food for humans -- until population numbers have fallen to a fraction of present levels.
I have said, in the 'vision' I have for the sustainable future of the global human experiment, that agriculture must be relied upon to feed us until we have reduced our numbers to a level that can be supported by regulated exploitation/harvesting activities that fall within the (now better understood) capacity of supporting ecosystems to maintain diversity, to restore soil mass lost by erosion and to replace soluble plant nutrients lost by harvest export or leaching.
This ' vision' is outlined in an essay entitled:
'POPULATION AND INTENSIVE CROP CULTURE ARE UNSUSTAINABLE' -------- that can be read at:
http://www.relocalize.net/population_and_intensive_crop_culture_are_unsustainable
------ to which is attached one journal paper and 3 book reviews.
The attractive aspect of moving toward sustainable co-existence with self-managing ecosystems is that the hit-and-miss process of evolution has already established how to make them work.
Our responsibility (after our numbers have fallen to sustainable levels) will be to learn to live within the regeneration capacity of restored self-managing natural ecosystems.
The penalty for exceeding their regeneration capacity will be hunger and privation, as it was for our hunter gatherer ancestors.
Please forward this email to your colleagues if you think its message may be of interest to them.
Peter Salonius