Dug up from the vaults! I just came across this piece I’d spoken, then jotted down a couple of years ago. I figured it might be appropriate to pop up here, since nothing else is going up this week. While I’d roll these concepts out differently now, it’s still fun to see how some of us in the Detroit scene were rolling out these ideas only a couple of years ago — and now to see how dramatically the national conversation about Detroit has changed. What seemed pie-in-the-sky only two years ago is now being seriously discussed around the globe. How quickly things can change. Anyway, here’s the piece:
This is a paraphrase transcript (written after the fact) of a brief talk that I gave in Ann Arbor as part of the Sustainability Salon series at the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore in April, 2008. I liked how it came together and so I wanted to capture the thoughts in written form. I believe this is a pretty accurate representation of what was said – and I think I squeezed it all into a 12 minutes introduction, which is surely a sign that I could have another career as an auctioneer. That’s partly why I wanted to try getting it down into written form where there’s more room for absorption and debate. Thanks for letting me share it with you.
Good evening, everybody, and thank you for having me here. It’s an honor to get to be up here with the rest of the panel and to share this time with all of you here. Sustainability is a topic that I’m passionate about, and I’m honored to have this chance to join you in discussion about it.
I live in the nuts and bolts of green buildings and sustainable development on a daily basis, and I talk to people about the practical things they can do to green their buildings. But today, I’m going to step back a little bit and share some of my views on the bigger picture. I’m hopeful that this will help us in our discussion about how we collectively tackle sustainable development.
I think there are primarily two major tasks ahead of us today in the world of sustainable development. The first is to take all the good work happening around green development and expand it. The truth is that a tremendous amount of good work is happening around these topics, and we just need to grow it in a BIG way – on steroids! We know what the things are that we need to do, we just need to do a lot more of them. That’s a big part of our task, and bravo to moving it forward.
The second task is that we have to solve the impossible problems. Because there are certain things that we haven’t figured out how to do yet. We need to find the answers to those things, and that’s what I want to focus on tonight. Besides, it’ll be fun. So this is our second task: to solve the impossible. As an example, I’d like to offer some of the work that I do, and talk about why I think Detroit can save the world. [laughter]
Yes, I know this can seem laughable, and I’ll grant that it’s outrageous… but let me also tell you why I think it’s true. I’m not saying Detroit will save the world, but rather that it can if, and that’s a big “if”, we tackle sustainable development seriously.
Why do I think this? Well let’s start with a look at Chicago. Chicago has set the goal of becoming the greenest city in the nation, and it’s off to a great start. But not everyone can use the Chicago example. Chicago started with a booming economic base and a really robust political machine. From that foundation, they’re adding on sustainability. It’s basically using the first strategy: doing great things by taking what we know to do and doing lots of it fast. Bally-hoo to Chicago.
But it’s not a model that many places around the world, including Detroit, can use, because we don’t have the same foundation. We all know that Detroit has many problems, including extreme poverty, racial, political and class divisions, a shrinking population, etc. So if we can create sustainable development in Detroit, not by tacking it on, but by actually using the tools of sustainable development to work with those challenges and transform them — then we’ll have learned the lessons of how to do sustainable development that anyone can use.
We have to reconsider Detroit as a laboratory for the 21st century. It’s the place that we’ve got room to experiment — and the pressing need to experiment (“Mother of invention” right?) — to find the solutions the world needs. To solve the impossible. There’s already a lot of experimentation underway. And lots of it has failed. That’s how experiments work. And that’s how we know that the old solutions, business as usual, won’t work in Detroit. We have to learn from those failures and innovate the future into being.
Through that process, we’ll discover how to create sustainable development that anyone can use. We’ll take the problems, and turn them into solutions. Let me give you some examples:
Detroiters lack good access to fresh food in many neighborhoods. Yet, the city is also full of empty lots and open prairie. I won’t spend time on it here, since the last salon dealt with food issues, but urban agriculture is strong and growing in Detroit. Last year, over 5,000 people in the city ate food that was grown in Detroit. Amazing work is happening on this, and if you’re interested I urge you to google detroit urban agriculture and find out more about it.
Since tonight’s topic is green building, I’ll give an example there. All over the country, cities are starting to tackle eco-developments and some are starting to tackle this on a community scale, creating eco-neighborhoods or urban ecovillages. But they’re also constrained by space and existing infrastructure. Detroit isn’t constrained in the same way. We have the potential to build not just one urban ecovillage but five, ten, fifteen.
Detroit could become the urban ecovillage capital of the world. And no other city in this country could try to tackle that quickly.
And while that may sound pie-in-the-sky, it’s not. Detroit already has at least four ecovillage projects in some stage of planning or consideration. While it’s hard to know exactly what will happen, it’s quite possible that we’ll have three ecovillage projects happening in Detroit in the next five years.
Imagine the synergies that start to emerge when you have not one, but three or more ecovillage communities in the same city.
So if this is some of our promise in local sustainable development, how do we do it? One of the problems is that we’re tackling this question the wrong way. When we ask HOW, we keep answering with WHAT. WHAT are the things we need to do: energy efficiency, green roofs, transit systems, etc. Those are all important, but they’re part of the first task: expanding on what we know. If we want to solve the impossible, then a different response will serve us better.
When we ask HOW, we shouldn’t talk about WHAT. When we ask HOW, then we need to ask WHO and WHY.
It’s basically an issue of integrity.
When we speak of personal integrity, we typically mean aligning your actions with your thoughts and ethics or values. To put it another way, integrity means synchronizing our body (actions) with our mind (thoughts) and spirit (ethics). To bring this integrity to our work in sustainable development, it’s always a good idea to start tightening up personal integrity: walking your talk, etc. That’s a great place to start. but we need to extend this to the movement at large. We need to align the actions, the what, of sustainability with the thoughts and ethics of more people.
To truly tackle sustainability, we’re generally working with a pretty broad ethical stance – it’s a big picture issue, right? And I think many of us working on this issue feel we’re working from the moral high ground. Which is fine, as I think that’s generally true. So often the primary task tackled with sustainability is to try to get everyone else to “get it”, to see that big picture. But then we get frustrated that more people aren’t working from the same motives, and then angry that they don’t “get it”. When we take this approach we’re basically looking to solve the sustainability challenge by trying to transform the consciousness of the entire planet.
How’s that working?
Right: not so well. Transforming consciousness is a great thing to do, but it’s really hard! And frankly we don’t have time. We can’t wait for the entire world’s consciousness to be transformed. We need better solutions now. So, if we can’t go for transformation, then what we can do is translation. What this means is that instead of insisting that people share our ethical stance in order to enact sustainability measures, instead we look and learn about who we are talking to and what their values are. What motivates them? Why do they do things? We then find ways to translate the motivations for sustainable actions into their own value system.
For example, when I talk to builders and developers about green building, some get the bigger picture, but many of them are primarily concerned with their bottom line and how to make the project make money. And that’s perfectly appropriate! They have workers to pay and families to feed, and so on. So instead of pitching green building for it’s global benefits or pollution reduction, we talk about the economic models, how green buildings can save money, improve marketing, efforts, etc. The WHAT, the actions we’re looking for, are the same, but the WHY changes with the WHO. This is translation. And if we can’t wait for the entire global population to transform it’s consciousness, then this is how we move sustainable development forward.
I’m assuming folks here are mostly familiar with the three circles of sustainability: the economic, environmental and social circles that must overlap to create sustainability. This is sometimes referred to as the triple bottom line. The world is finally catching on to the overlap between economic and environmental concerns. While there’s still lots more work to happen there, people are catching on to the idea that those two can work in conjunction for robust successes. And these two work largely in the WHAT or body realm – they deal with more physical, tangible things. But the social sphere is still left out much of the time. Partly because it’s more complicated and harder to figure out – and partly because it’s dealing more with the value systems and higher ethics.
To pursue integrity, and to create truly sustainable programs, we need to incorporate the social sphere better, and I believe this is one of the great tasks ahead of us. So, I’d like to close with a way to apply these ideas to incorporating the social realm more completely. And since I’m all fired up about the idea of urban ecovillages, I’ll use an example from there.
As we see interest expanding around creating eco-neighborhoods or other similar projects, people are mostly talking about how to create green buildings on a neighborhood scale. And that’s great, but I contend that a neighborhood of green buildings does not make an ecovillage. Where’s the village? Where’s the social component? Well, it’s hard to figure out how to create this in a development, so I’d like to see us create more accessible tools to incorporating better social systems and structures around sustainable developments.
One example of how to do this is to introduce better methods of conflict resolution. I’m working on a variety of ways to adopt language for condo associations or neighborhood projects that require the use of mediation instead of litigation as a first step in resolving conflicts. We live in a litiginous society. People love to sue. But mediation has been shown to be more effective at creating lasting agreements and solutions, and it’s cheaper and faster that litigation! Clearly it’s a better process, right?
Well that was translation: cheaper, faster and more effective. You can translate the advantages of conflict resolution to match the motives of the parties involved. I didn’t talk about how conflict resolution is a more evolved method of resolving conflicts that actually works from a higher moral perspective, though I believe it is. But we get it used through translation, and then people can use the tools. And that can create better social cohesion. And that alone is a great success.
Even better is this: through translation, we can get people to use these improved structures, like mediation or green buildings. Translation gets them to the action. But then sometimes through the experience of these sustainable forms, people experience a transformation – and they “get” the bigger picture. And so translation can get the actions done, but then often leads people to a more direct experience that can lead to transformation. And we need both, and we need to include everyone, to create truly sustainable development.
Thank you.
[Note: I owe the basic notion of transformation and translation to Barret Brown, Ken Wilber and others at the Integral Institute's Sustainability program. I am happy to be part of explaining and elaborating on this concept for various audiences. It is one of my own personal passions to apply this to the world of conflict resolution.]
