Rorotoko

In a nutshell

Sustainability is all the rage. Political and business leaders talk earnestly and passionately about going green. A growing number of books, movies, and public conversations signal a general unease about the present, growing uncertainty about the future of both the environment and our own human species. While this growing attention is a positive step, the popularization of sustainability may in the long-run do much more harm than good. For sustainability itself—as it is currently conceived—fails to address a deeper problem threatening the earth.

Sustainability by Design exposes the roots of unsustainability, pointing to the failure of modernity and its reliance on technology to solve all problems—big and small. Modern cultures have become addicted to solutions that produce serious, even pathological, unintended consequences, particularly mindless consumption posing as the magic elixir of satisfaction and happiness.

The book offers a radically different conversation about sustainability. It starts with a new definition: sustainability is the possibility that humans and other life flourish on the Earth forever. Sustainability is at heart a story about flourishing and care, coming forth from a transformed culture. The path toward transformation starts with the restoration of the caring and ethical behavior that makes the human species distinct from all other life. Beyond the definition, the book lays out a framework for designing new forms of everyday artifacts and institutional routines that can break the addictive patterns of current individual and organizational life-styles, and also embed new beliefs and values aligned with sustainability into the culture.

Central to the story is a model of being that rests on care, not need, as the feature that underpins human action. Readers should be prepared to confront and suspend their own stories about how the outside world works and how they act and experience life. They need to be open to a new story, based on beliefs and practices that are sharply different but somehow feel right. Elie Wiesel once said that “[p]eople become the stories they hear, and the stories they tell.” Sustainability depends on these new stories.

The wide angle

The germ of this book sprouted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I had returned in my mid-50s to start an academic career, after spending some 35 years working in the environmental world. I was a charter member of the Alliance for Global Sustainability, a joint program of MIT, The Swiss Federal Technical Institute, and the University of Tokyo. Even with sustainability in the program title, we talked mostly about sustainable development. I was always uneasy because there was something about this term—sustainable development—that seemed a bit oxymoronic.

When people talk or write about sustainability, they usually loosely refer to it as a noun. Most of the time they talk about “sustainable something,” like sustainable development, buildings, business, even sustainable style, and so on and on. When sustainable is used in this adjectival sense, the object of attention is always on the word it modifies. Sustainable development is not really about sustainability, a noun. It’s all about economic development albeit a particular form of economic development that is supposed to be more benign than the way it works today.

My colleagues at MIT and so many others were doing their best to attack threatening problems like climate change. I saw extremely talented people seeking technological fixes, like higher efficiency automobiles. But few if any were probing the roots of these threats. I started to teach a graduate seminar on technology and society. We explored the historic benefits of technology, but I also saw a darker side, and eventually a link between this dark side and the arrival of unsustainability. Some five years later the book emerged.

Sustainability by Design addresses what I believe is the most important issue of our time. While we certainly have to deal with two wars, a horrendous financial mess, fisheries disappearing, global warming, and more—deeper down we are worried about the sustainability of the whole system. Can the social, economic, and planetary systems that support us continue to deliver all the qualities of life we hold important?

We heard much about the American Dream during the last election season in the United States. This image changes over time, but it usually includes words like freedom, liberty, opportunity, and happiness. Alternately, people associate it with things like home ownership, or a chicken in every pot, or a car in every garage. To understand sustainability, one must see a sharp distinction between these two lists. The second grouping is about things that we can usually buy in the marketplace. The items in the first are very different. Properties like happiness are intangible. They show up almost as an aura when the world around us is working right. We know when they are present, even if we lack instruments to detect and measure them. But we can’t get them by building machines to produce them. One can’t produce the beauty of a Rembrandt from a paint-by-numbers kit.

Sustainability belongs in this category. My vision of sustainability is the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever. In my book I say, “Possibility may be the most powerful word in our language because it enables humans to visualize and strive for a future that is not available to them in the present nor may have existed in the past.” But we cannot create sustainability without examining the roots of the present unsustainable state of the world.

cultures eventually begin to produce pathological, unintended consequences when the world changes, but cultural habits don’t