The Business Case for Sustainability: Part One

Nearly fifty years ago, my two brothers and I would go to our neighbor’s homes and ask if we could rake their leaves. Sometimes we would get paid (maybe a quarter if anything) and sometimes we would not, but in every case, we brought home the raked-up leaves so that our father could lay them over our small garden in the backyard. Our father would then cover the leaves with a tarp and there the leaves would sit throughout the fall, into winter and eventually become “black gold” or organic mulch for the beautiful flowers and vegetables that were harvested throughout the summer and into the early fall. If there was mulch left over, and often there was, we would put the mulch into brown paper bags and offer it back to our neighbors so that they could use the mulch for there own gardens. My father was a big believer and doer in helping others, particularly in the neighborhood where we lived and grew up through grade school, junior high and high school.

Little did I know it then, but was soon to learn in my studies at college, that our family was practicing sustainable practices whereby we would work to balance the social, economic and ecological aspects of our neighborhood. We raked up the leaves, sometimes were paid, put them back into the earth to make mulch, shared the mulch when and wherever we could and the outcome was a bounty of fresh vegetables and beautiful flowers. My father grew so many beautiful flowers that when he entered the chrysanthemum show in the fall, he very nearly won in every category that he entered. After our father died in a car accident at a very early age in his life (and ours) my younger brother took to the land and he grew as many if not more beautiful mums and won award after award. In short, the lessons my father learned were passed down to his three sons, as we all today grow our own home gardens and have taught our children as well. There is something magical and wonderful about learning beside your father (or mother) and then passing that learning down through the generations.

In our later years as teenagers, we joined the Boy Scouts and learned even more about what good stewardship was to mean for the fragile globe we all share today. That stewardship is the essence and outcome of all things sustainable: the protection of our current resources so that future generations could draw from and share and leave behind even better resources for those who would come behind us. We had learned as young boys, then young men what it meant to protect, serve and regenerate our natural environment. As a Boy Scout, I used to be able to drink water out of streams and rivers all over the state of West Virginia, where I camped and grew up. Honestly, today, I do not think I or anyone would dare to drink water out of a river, let alone a mountain stream before we would treat the water with iodine or some kind of a fancy UV or reverse osmosis type of system.

Two of my favorite books came to me from Paul Hawken—Natural Capitalism and The Ecology of Commerce. I had read both books when I was part of a team of like-minded folks when we were drawing up plans to buy, develop and regenerate a ranch surrounded by wilderness and a national forest outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our plans included all things sustainable: we would develop sustainable ecological aquaculture (high-minded fish farming) along side the wild and year-round flowing Pecos River; we would develop a center for integrative health and wellness; we would develop and employ local artisans, craftsmen, farmers, ranchers and others to help us regenerate the land that once bordered a national park and national forest; we would build a sustainable community—very high tech and yet a very soft “footprint” on the land; all buildings would incorporate local, indigenous materials that were renewable, yet practical in heating and cooling the residences. Finally, we were in conversations with a major hotelier, an organization that would manage and operate our sustainable resort less than 20 minutes from Santa Fe. The restaurant would serve only local, organic and free-range foods that grew and were harvested from our land. And, we would invite folks of all types of backgrounds, ages and demographics to come and "play" in our Regenerative Development Institute and be a part of building our community.

The preceding was a very big vision back in the 1990’s (but not a dotcom), but one that we are seeing, in part, come to light today. In fact, our original development team has reemerged and reconnected to do this again on a different ranch but with many of the same ideas (even better ideas) to be developed today. We believe that the market, what Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson call the “cultural creatives”, consists of  somewhere between 50 and 70 million people in the United States who are believers in, and practitioners of, careful consumerism, innovation, integrative health, wellness, spirituality, technology, arts and culture, history, organic food and clothing, music, “green” buildings and homes, nesting and community. In short, cultural creatives want to live in harmony with their community and in alignment with their body, mind, spirit and emotions—a holistic and systemic approach to living! So, clearly there is a market around us for all of the above and people are now just being informed, participating in and taking action to bring all these products and services to bear in the marketplace.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy is the father of General Systems Theory. Born in the early 20th century, he rose to prominence as a Theoretical Biologist who used and studied biological systems as metaphors for organizational and human systems. This “open systems” approach gave rise in the 1960’s to the study of psychological, social and historical levels of organization. In short, if we change one aspect of a system in one place, it will ultimately have an impact on the whole system in another place (remember our earlier admonition of “unintended consequences”). GST is the transdiciplinary study of the abstract organization of phenomena and the principles common to all complex entities. There are many other elements of GST, and out of the study of whole and open systems we find today’s remarkable work in chaos theory and the sciences of complexity. Systems concepts include: system-environment boundary, input, output, process, state, hierarchy, goal-directedness, and information. Applications of system theory can be found across a wide array of disciplines: management, leadership, computing, engineering, ecology, organization design, mathematics, physics, thermodynamics, artificial intelligence, biology, sociology, and political science, to name a few.

In short, it is the study of how everything is related to everything else. We need to be able to stand back and look beyond all the fragmented parts in order to see the whole. As we quoted John Muir earlier in our Manifesto, you find that when we pull a thread to one thing in the universe, we find it connected to everything else. And, to paraphrase Einstein, we must learn to see the world anew. Seeing the possibilities that sustainability brings us, is to see the world in an entirely new way. We must act now. There are many things to do-not try-but do. In my next blog, I will delve deeper into many of the possible business challenges and opportunities around sustainability—seeing, for example, not just the opportunities to create products and services for the cultural creatives, or how and why we should strive to build “green” buildings, or take eco-tourism vacations, etc. but how do we manage in a sustainable way (something I like to call “intra-organizational ecology”) and how do we engage others in the discussion. We need not just keep the earth sustainable as in keeping it from further harm and destruction; we need to think in terms of healing and growth or regeneration so that future generations can see how and why we all must be involved in making a contribution to furthering the development of life on our planet.