Tulitha King

Tag: sustainability

  • How sustainability challenges our needs

    While I’ve long known of the 1987 Brundtland definition of sustainability: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” I have always focused on those words ‘future generations’.

    Sustainability has always been about the future, future proofing the world in a sense.

    I’ve seen sustainability take on a tech-substitution approach. It seems the easiest thing to grasp onto in a consumptive economic system. And, indeed, in the rush of life, substitution is a very easy quick-fix to slip into.

    Substitution tells us that we can achieve sustainability so long as we continue consuming. Ensuring that what we consume is (somehow) better than the other thing we could have consumed.

    It’s an easy side-step, but it puts us all in a bit of a bind, and it makes us all a bit blind as we simply continue living our lives and going about business as usual, trusting that technology gods or people smarter than us will come up with the inventions we need to escape what seems a hopeless case.

    This has actually become, not a circular economy, but a circular problem. An ouroboros. To some an ouroboros represents eternal life, but as the wonderful Tyson Yunkaporta tells us: how can it be a symbol of eternal life if it will eventually eat itself? If anything that is self-destructive, no matter what we call it.

    The moment I realised that we need to focus on that word “need” within the Brundtland definition came about through a little desktop research into Manfred Max-Neef.

    Manfred Max-Neef developed a matrix of existential and axiological Human Needs which form the foundation of Human Scale Development.

    From wikipedia: Human Scale Development is basically community development and is “focused and based on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of growing levels of self-reliance, and on the construction of organic articulations of people with nature and technology, of global processes with local activity, of the personal with the social, of planning with autonomy and of civil society with the state. Human needs, self-reliance, and organic articulations are the pillars which support Human Scale Development.”

    The pillars! Of course. My worlds collided. It’s in needs that all my interest areas come together: Wellbeing economics, degrowth, sustainable development, community development, urban environment, the natural world, personal development.

    And it was Max-Neef’s articulation of “need” that the 1987 Brundtland definition was based on. I had never considered that those words were obviously carefully chosen and not only that, but a definition of “need” was supplied.

    So the Brundtland definition doesn’t just call on us to preserve our way of life for future generations to be able to enjoy the same way of life. It is actually calling us to examine how we expect to live and ask ourselves: Is this actually what I need – or is it just what I want? Sometimes what we want directs us to what is actually an essential need, and we can be alert to this and take ourselves, and our apparent needs a little less seriously in order to get to the real stuff below the surface.

    E.g.1. I want to eat chips. Once I start I can’t stop. This is because my body actually needs good fats to function well. There are fats in chips – the body recognises this – but they are not the good kind and so the body desperately triggers the “more” button, in the hopes that its need for good fats will be met.

    E.g.2. Social media has captivated us and plays on our dopamine response, a quick buzz when we get a like or a comment on our posts. But we all know we can doom-scroll ourselves to depression or breakdown. We want to doom-scroll, but what this dopamine fuelled bid for connection is showing us is that we actually need real, true, deep connection with people and the oxytocin release this provides. Those relationships are, in fact, something our communities, institutions and cultures were traditionally built around – that is real wisdom-thinking!

    There are some sustainability people who are shining a light on appropriate needs.

    Initially the Club of Rome’s 1972 publication, The Limits to Growth, called us out to say: Hey, you can’t just keep getting what you want. There are limits to what the earth can sustain! The conversation dwindled around population and resource availability for some time.

    More recently, the Doughnut Economics model seeks to place our needs in the context of sustainability. Looking at a “sweet spot” of human wellbeing where needs are met (not necessarily wants, remember), but the planet is also cared for. However, it doesn’t fully articulate where we ought to be examining our societal expectations for what a good life means. I do think this could be clearer. Sometimes we humans need things spelled out (in the right way, firmly and clearly, with understanding).

    However, I think it shows us the balance it takes to live and run the world in a way that is long-term sustainable. The delicate balance which humans (and nature)are designed to exist in is the most difficult thing to obtain. Good systems and our governance should maintain this balance, and not fall prey to the simplicity of more (GDP). That is a clear message of the model.

    Another economic movement, Degrowth (possibly my favourite economic concept, elegantly expressed as Decroissance in French) also suggests we personally and nationally put a scalpel between our wants and needs. Degrowth is, in a sense, an economic diet. We need to reduce out over-sized economies to something that is going to be more sustainable for the planet.

    That’s for society, but I’m not sure whether Degrowth articulates the implication that we, personally, also need to rethink our own over-sized lives to bring them into something that is more sustainable for the planet. This is hard to do. If you are the only prophet in the city you tend to look like a bit of a crazy. But if good leaders help us to see that this could in fact be the most practical and necessary approach then it can become a shared, enriching experience, to walk this path together. (Togetherness is an essential need.)

    Some sustainability advocates get this needs reduction mandate and challenge us to reconsider our needs through Buy Nothing New Challenges.

    To further reduce our assumed needs, what if we also tried:

    • Fly nowhere (as Rob Hopkins does)
    • Go car-less (as Artist as Family do)
    • Eat only local – and only what’s needed
    • Earn the bare minimum (As Mark Boyle did)
    • Share everything
    • Invest X hours/week enriching a meaningful relationship.
    • Live small (a la the Tiny House movement)
    • Ditch all the streaming services
    • Cancel your social media accounts

    Essentially, we could test a wants-reduction-diet, across multiple fields where we’ve traditionally expected more or haven’t even thought about how our consumption might have fallen into the overshoot part of the Doughnut (e.g. our internet use is one likely culprit).

    Like any good diet we then need to add in the good things. It’s like cutting out what we want (chips) and replacing them with what we need (good fats like coconut oil and avocado).

    And Max-Neef’s Needs Matrix can help us. He tells us what those good and essential needs are, the building blocks to a good life. These needs are what the 1987 Brundtland definition of sustainable development relied on – not meeting our current wants by continuing consumption and product innovation. but suggesting we first scrutinise our needs.

    According to Max-Neef these needs are:

    • Subsistence
    • Protection
    • Affection
    • Understanding
    • Participation
    • Idleness
    • Creation
    • Identity
    • Freedom

    These are expressed through ways of:

    • Being
    • Having
    • Doing
    • Interacting

    Examples are:

    • eating (doing subsistence)
    • hugging (doing affection)
    • friendships (having affection)
    • customs (having identity)
    • theatre (interacting creativity)

    I’ll offer a controversial example. Some may say, “see I express my need for freedom through doing overseas travel.” This may be the case, but we should be honest with ourselves, overseas travel is a massive privilege that very few people through all of history have been able to access. Did they then live without being able to express the freedom they essentially needed? Not likely. Possibly they were able to express the same need through going on a long walk or swimming in a beautiful waterhole, or in the way they lived – not so attached to work and jobs as we tend to be these days (earning for the overseas travel – see, it’s the ouroboros). No need to pump fossil fuel out of the earth to fulfill that essential need for freedom, we need to find less energy intensive ways to fulfill our essential needs and place our wants firmly in the privilege pile.

    If we’re serious about sustainability, we do actually need to make it normal, together, to need less. So that our grandchildren won’t suffer from the fact that we took more than we needed. I for one don’t want to be the one crazy person in the village – I have tried it and it doesn’t seem to be very effective anyway. But I also don’t want a life lived in excess to weigh on my conscience. It would be nice to know we were all living in a way the earth could support – together.

    As Margaret Mead famously quipped: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

    When we’re courageous enough to say “enough”, that’s when we won’t be swallowed up by an economic system that demands too much.

  • Deep roots grow strong trees

    “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
    — James Gustave Speth

    [This is part two of The Social Side of Climate Change.]

    I’d like to return to the idea, in part one, that connecting our children with nature is key to unlocking both the passion and creativity to address the environmental (and perhaps social) issues facing us today.

    I would argue that our disconnection with nature has paralleled a disconnection with ourselves and one another. We do see this in the ways we relate to one another, very often through screens. Previously our schools, workplaces and families were places to grow in relationship. Critical spaces to test what’s permissible and possible within our relationships. The petrie dish, the first battleground is the family, something I’ve witnessed first hand. Difficult children need more time, more guidance. They need to make trouble in order to learn where and when to stop. This can’t be done if children are more attached to screens (much easier for parents!) than arguing around a board game. We have one child in particular who is very painful to play board games with – they are now in their teens – but we persist. With every argument I remind myself that this is their chance to learn social skills. The siblings often get the worst of their brothers or sisters, but they are all learning and it’s the parent who is most connected to be able to guide them.

    That’s a hard task, not for the faint of heart, the tired or the distracted. Things I and us all have been. And we’re allowed to be. That’s their chance to learn to give space.

    So the social nature of relationships is challenged by our current social cultures.

    Our nature-relationships are also challenged.

    Whereas, once before, outside play made up most of the domain of the young, here they are again constricted from very early ages to an outdoor space the size of a pen. If they walk outside those boundaries they hold hands and cross roads in straight lines, sticking to concrete paths and adult guidance. Gone are the days where mum and dad sent the children of the neighbourhood off together in a group down to the creek to fish with home made rods and hooks, maybe even a bow and arrow slung over a shoulder. Even playing cricket on a nearby oval, away from adult supervision, is a rare thing.

    This disconnection from nature doesn’t allow a child – who becomes an adult – to develop an intuitive sense of the natural world, to observe its rhythms and subtle and intricate interlinkings, to witness the relationship of the wind to the bugs to the birds to the foxes to the rabbits to the pollen to the grass heads to the leaves as they drop in autumn. They don’t see the old wombat hole overgrown with blackberries or the new burrow in the bank of a river.

    They don’t observe how the beautiful Orchard Swallowtail butterfly is the adult of the exquisite, scented caterpillar eating most of the lemon tree’s leaves. They can’t connect that the prolifigation of Painted Lady butterflies is a direct result of the nettle plants that were left to self seed over winter.

    They don’t realise that the answer to the mouse plague is to tolerate the snakes that come up from the nature reserve. They don’t observe to recognise that the snake is more scared of them than they are of it, and it’s more interested in the mice than the human. They don’t see the birds dying in their nests because of the poisoned mice now running from the homes where bait is used to attempt to control the plague.

    If they don’t see this, they don’t get the chance to care. They don’t develop the memory of seeing a sickly bird crouching in its nest, eyes opening and closing slowly as it quietly waits for death to come; or watching a smooth, silky snake swallow a mouse hole before sliding away again; or seeing a fat, brown wombat’s bottom wiggle into the hole it is digging out from under it. Then, as an adult, the plight of the poisoned bird, or the decline of butterflies in a suburb dominated by artificial grass, is so separate from the person as to seem to not even matter to our existence – when this is far, far from the fact.

    A child can quickly become attuned to the balance and imbalances of nature, if we just let them. The chance to sit back and observe nature in action can create children who are able to take stock, put pieces of a puzzle together, be quiet in their own thoughts and allow true creativity to arise – almost spontaneously from the rich hummus of thought that has been allowed to compost in a child’s heart and mind.

    One book I read about this connection spoke of a child in a daycare centre who’s “special place” was sitting, hidden in the one bamboo copse in the corner of the daycare yard. Even in a citified surrounding the child naturally gravitates toward that copse. Not only that, but it was the “special place” of most of the children in that centre.

    In this there is a clue that, building nature-care is as simple as including some wild places in our children’s lives, whether it’s the smallest plot of bamboo, a veggie garden, even a worm farm or a wind chime or an oval on which to watch the clouds. Bringing nature into our children’s lives should be at the forefront of any future-focussed person. Love and instinctive care of the natural world is where any sustainabile living needs to start if it is to be wholistic in scope and effective in practice.

  • The social side of Climate Change

    “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
    — James Gustave Speth

    I have been wanting to write about this quote for a good while.

    I first encountered Speth’s words during my undergraduate in Sustainable Development – many years ago. It was striking at that time, as it was where I saw my own interests honing in.

    I am not a scientist. A type I see as someone who is detail oriented, questioning, analytical, highly logical with a good degree of skepticism. The scientific process can be somewhat constrained and lengthy, going through a process of peer review to test assumptions.

    These are all good things. However working with people, on a human-made problem (on which there is consensus that climate change is one) does not always fit into a scientific formula or process, as Speth alludes to above.

    It requires iteration, openness, letting go of processes, a focus on outcomes with a flexible mindset as to what those outcomes might look like. Like a scientist curiosity is all important, but not a curiosity as to how something works but a curiosity as to how people feel, think, are motivated – behaviour follows last. Scientific skepticism is antithetical to working with people. If anything the approach needs to be one of trust and belief in a person’s intrinsic intelligence, creativity and altruism. Trust breeds trust. That is a formula that needs blind faith to test in the real world.

    Cut to me several years later, having fallen into the field of Community Development – but with a total orientation toward Sustainable Development, for the sake of our planet home, and the people in it. What I have found is that scientists and engineers populate the field of sustainability. Sustainability has become almost only about tech substitution:

    • Power from fossil fuels or solar panels
    • Asphalt made from bitumen and gravel or recycled aggregate such as plastic or recycled glass
    • Clothes made from virgin polyester or recycled polyester
    • Clothes made from cotton or organic cotton
    • A car converted from petrol to electric
    • A double glazing rather than single glazing
    • Storing water on a property rather than relying on municipal dams
    • Packaging made from plastic or recyclable material
    • Orienting a house north (or south, if in the northern hemisphere) to capture sunlight, then using thermal mass principles to capture that heat
    • Waste directed into recycling streams rather than rubbish streams

    The building industry has advocates and industry bodies and assessments such as the Green Building Council of Australia’s Green Star certification, BREEAM or LEED from the US Green Building Council.

    Planners also have growing principles around walkability and cyclability, improving transport emissions through behaviour change through design.

    Can you see what’s missing here?

    There is nothing about human motivations, human desires, human needs, human relationships. The field of planning is the only one which comes close. Still the focus is on manipulation of behaviour through design.

    Climate Change has relied on scientists spruiking information. Over a (too) long period of time this has become common knowledge, but it has become politicised. It’s now acceptable to state that you don’t believe in Climate Change and excuse it as being a result of the urban heat island effect (instruments of measurement are located in human habitation hot spots, thereby giving inaccurate readings). But if facts are facts then stating you don’t believe in Climate Change is surely like saying you don’t believe in tornados or droughts or birds or the changing tide or any other natural phenomenon.

    So, yes, Speth is right. Still we haven’t yet connected humanity with caring for Climate Change in a way that is both meaningful and impactful. In a way that adjusts our behaviour.

    Sometimes the greatest impact individuals see they can have on Climate Change is through consumption, and I have seen this become a trendy topic with brand names jumping on board. Some friends, seeing their only role as one of consumer, dutifully purchase the things they are told to purchase from mean-well brands selling those tech subsitutes: plastic free toilet paper, eco friendly windows, recycled timber, recycled asphalt, socially conscious body wash, shampoo bars, vegan food, eco friendly sneakers – the trendier these are the more traction they gain. This puts environmental action into a precarious position – it requires advocates and brands to be at the centre of popularity in order to make any dent on behaviour change. This requires an enormous amount of energy to achieve. It also begins to exclude those who need it most, and become the domain of the wealthy and trendy.

    So it does not strike at the heart of the matter.

    There are glimmers of hope.

    The Transition Town movement is one of them, strongly connecting individuals with care of each other and the earth through community action. It’s community action that can touch every aspect of the human life experience: economy, transport, power generation, development, planning, food production, clothing, waste – nearly everything you can think of can be brought back to that local level in the face of globalisation and consumerism. In fact, it’s potentially the only way it can be done.

    Jon Alexander writes in CITIZENS about the power and potential of shifting the human story from that of consumer to that of citizen. It’s changed once before, shifting from subject to consumer, so it can change again.

    BCorps look to bring environmental and social aspirations into the centre of businesses. However, again, for these to succeed they still need to win at capitalism and win over the consumer.

    Wellbeing economy principles are gaining traction with governments and local council around the world, but not quite enough traction just yet.

    And there are philosophers, somewhat outliers, decrying the need for a change of heart. Charles Eisenstein is one, provoking his readers to think deeply about their meaning and purpose in life. Helen Norberg-Hodge advocates for localisation. Even Jane Goodall issues a cri de couer to care for our one planet. And Richard Louv challenges how we are raising our children.

    And it’s here that we see a clue. Children who are raised with exposure to nature – free, unfettered, abosorptive exposure – grow up with a deeper concern for the environment than those who do not.

    We return then to the earth and its environment as Mother Nature. A term which calls forth a kind of relationship with nature which we are losing and we are lacking.

    [end of part 1]