Envisioning a Sustainable World
This bellow was written over twenty years ago--I wonder if anything ever became of it?
Envisioning a Sustainable World
( it is better formatted online - www.donellameadows.org/archives/envisioning-a-sustainable-world/ )
By Donella Meadows~
Written for the Third Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics, October 24-28, 1994, San Jose, Costa Rica
Abstract
Vision is the most vital step in the policy process. If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress. Yet vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our whole culture. We talk about our fears, frustrations, and doubts endlessly, but we talk only rarely and with embarrassment about our dreams. Environmentalists have been especially ineffective in creating any shared vision of the world they are working toward — a sustainable world in which people live within nature in a way that meets human needs while not degrading natural systems. Hardly anyone can imagine that world, especially not as a world they’d actively like to live in. The process of building a responsible vision of a sustainable world is not a rational one. It comes from values, not logic. Envisioning is a skill that can be developed, like any other human skill. This paper indicates how.
Introduction
To bring our world toward sustainability — or any other goal — we need to take different kinds of steps, which require different kinds of knowledge, talent, skill, and work.
We need, for example, to make things happen — pass laws, make budgets, find resources, hire people, establish and manage organizations, invent technologies, build, restore, protect, tax, subsidize, regulate, punish, reward, DO THINGS. Implementation is the active, visible phase of achieving a goal, and therefore it is the most discussed phase. Probably 90% of all public discourse involves arguing about implementation. Most policy debates start and end with this phase, unfortunately.
I say “unfortunately,” because any talk of implementation is necessarily based on models, which explain how we got to whatever state we are in, and what we should do to get to a better state. Models may be in computers, on paper, or in our heads. They may be sophisticated, but usually they are very simple — for example: “freeing the market from regulation will make things better,” or “new technology is all we need to solve our problem.” We debate and challenge our models far too little, especially the models in our heads. Most of them are too narrow, too linear, too lacking in understanding of feedback, time-lags, exponentiality, variability, diversity, and other aspects of real-system complexity. Obviously, if our models are faulty, all the skillful and well-funded implementation in the world will not get us to sustainability or any other goal.
There are at least two more ingredients of the policy process that precede and are even more important than modeling. One of them is information. We need to know where we are and where we have been. Information not only validates or disproves our models, it helps us form and develop them and turn them into action. If information about our history and present situation is biased, delayed, incomplete, noisy, disorganized, or missing, our models will be wrong, and our implementation will be untimely and misdirected. Improving information means, among other activities, monitoring, organizing data, choosing wise indicators, education, communication (especially through the public media), and — an issue vital to ecological economics — the removal of bias from price signals.
If 90% of policy discussion focuses on implementation, virtually all the remaining 10% focuses on modeling and information. That leaves 0% for the last step of policy formation, which should be first — the establishment of clear, feasible, socially shared goals. What do we want? Where would we like all these models, this information, this implementation to take us? What is our vision of the world we are trying to create for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren?
Environmentalists have failed perhaps more than any other set of advocates to project vision. Most people associate environmentalism with restriction, prohibition, regulation, and sacrifice. Though it is rarely articulated directly, the most widely shared picture of a sustainable world is one of tight and probably centralized control, low material standard of living, and no fun. I don’t know whether that impression is so common because puritanism is the actual, nexpressed, maybe subconscious model in the minds of environmental advocates, or whether the public, deeply impacted by advertising, can’t imagine a good life that is not based on wild and wasteful consumption. Whatever the reason, hardly anyone envisions a sustainable world as one that would be wonderful to live in.
The best goal most of us who work toward sustainability offer is the avoidance of catastrophe. We promise survival and not much more. That is a failure of vision.
Even if information, models, and implementation could be perfect in every way, how far can they guide us, if we know what direction we want to move away from but not what direction we want to go toward? There may be motivation in escaping doom, but there is even more in creating a better world. And it is pitifully inadequate to describe the exciting possibilities of sustainability in terms of mere survival — at least that’s what my vision of sustainability tells me.
But I didn’t always have such a vision. I had to learn, or perhaps I should say relearn, to create and express vision. In our industrial culture, particularly in the cultures of science and economics, envisioning is actively discouraged. We have to rediscover and practice it again. Perhaps if I tell you the story of my own experience with vision, you will understand what I mean.
Continues here
Re: Envisioning a Sustainable World
It's good to have a vision of what we really want. This is what's recommended by the "Law of Attraction" folks and many similar teachers, books, etc. Focus on what you want as it's all too easy to be dreadfully mired in what we don't want.
But having a vision is not enough; it's also necessary to bring it down to earth or to the reality of what-is where we are today, in this moment. If we want to take a hike, it doesn't work well to be obsessively focused on our destination, trying to be there now. We need to negotiate the terrain where we are. We can, of course, hold our destination in some part of our mind, recognizing that it's out there somewhere and our attention needs to be here with us and what we're doing in the present.
If we want to solve a problem or create something new in the world - like an economic system that ensures everyone's real needs are well met (a novel idea, I realize!) or even a whole new social order - having a vision of what the solution or the new system looks and feels like will certainly help. The next thing we need to be clear about is the purpose for what we propose to do: why or for what purpose do we want this solution or new system? Answering this will give us essential clues to the principles that our undertaking must embody.
For example, if we want to design and build a system that has as its purpose ensuring everyone's nutritional needs are well met, we can then begin making a list of questions that need to be answered so we have a sense of where to begin. A first question might be: how do we provide access to vital food resources for people who are now denied that access? Another might be: Why is it (or what are the reasons) many people do not already have access to these resources? What can we do from right here, where we are with the tools and resources that are available to us to answer these questions.
The trick is not to let our perceived sense of what's possible or how difficult our task seems from where we are now dishearten us and lead us to exasperation or despair. And I believe we need to be realistic about what is within our power and what is not, otherwise we may waste a lot of energy trying to change things in ways that are unlikely to work instead of focusing our efforts on what could succeed.
We can't change the world "out there" somewhere; we can only do it here where we are and with those we are with (or who will join us). As Margaret Mead said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." We don't have power or influence over millions of people and probably never will. But perhaps we could find a small group of people who want to give birth to a new system - or even a new society - and who would be willing to come together, spend time envisioning what we want to create, clarify its purpose or mission and spell out the operating principles that will guide us.
As is said: the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. A new society may begin with a handful of people who choose to head off in a new direction, e.g., toward togetherness, cooperation, mutual caring and support. And if we find our journey together enjoyable and rewarding enough - and share that with others, more people may decide to follow us. And so it grows. . .
CSummer
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