Prelude: education in a managed system

What is education for? Why do we do schools?
I ask these simple questions at the start of this book because I think it is time that we take a long and serious look at the purpose of our education systems, country by country, region by region, town by town and challenge those who run them to step beyond their vested interests and consider for a moment if the education we provide for our citizens really is suitable for the world in which we live. My view is that we are seriously out of alignment.
For more than two decades, many people, in many countries have grappled with the challenge of the effective improvement of schools and school systems. These efforts have witnessed vast sums of public money being spent. They have witnessed numerous specialized agencies and advisory groups being established. They have seen testing regeimes come and go, inspections and criteria for performance and accountability being introduced, modified and redesigned.
The two primary drivers of the reforms, school effectiveness and school improvement have in themselves moved from the obscure preoccupation of a group of academics, to the mainstream. In so doing their original objectives, driven by interests of equity, freedom and social justice have become diluted and distorted. The relentless modifications and tinkering with the monolithic structures of schooling have not transformed schools, instead, they have generated a distorted, engorged, reified version of Fordism. Schools function under a managerial system which plays to the mediocre and the monotonous as if it were the bastion of quality. It denies rather than embraces freedom, voice and choice. It colludes with a self-satisfied illusion of innovation and it stifles creative thinkers and struggles to know what to do and how to think about with a vast array of non-conformist learners. Despite unprecedented levels of continuous professional development of pedagogic reform, teachers, as if footsoldiers to someone else’s battle, continue to transmit a body of knowledge to students who are frequently the passive recipients of a mundane curriculum for a set number of hours each day, each week, each year on the back of a worldview that is outdated, and too scared to attend to its real, deep seated prejudice.
Our desperate efforts to improve upon these dire experiences, when of course, students begin to rebel and systematically fail to respond to the altogether putrid churning desperation of what we laughably call education is to set up ‘challenges.’ Our schools functionally provide a form of knowledge through a fragmented and specialized set of subjects which promote a world view that asserts if we maintain a certain amount of personal and organizational order, control and planning we will be successful in life and institution. Yet the rate of unemployment of young people is increasing and the number of graduates on minimum wage is at an all time high. Schooling is failing. All of this stuff happens, on a daily basis, to thousands of people, within cavernous buildings, disconnected from most other aspects of daily life. It is run and regulated by adults, it is defined by adults and managed – not led - on behalf of others who they do not know, and who they often fear, whose only philosophy is to have no philosophy of education at all for fear of commitment and connection to something. And finally, when these students get to leave they learn that much of what they have learnt isn’t worth knowing as the world outside is differently configured, differently operating and differently focused and preoccupied, and much of what they could have learnt could have happened without all the pressures and anxieties that overstressed teachers pile upon their students just so that they can maintain their school’s place in an arbitrary league table created at a whim to placate our educated public who have grown up inside this mess.

hydroponics on a MASSIVE scale!

These examples are just awesome - think skyscraper, then think farm, then bring the two together and what do you get - an urban farm able to produce vast amounts of hydroponicaly generated food in the middle of cities - brilliant - simple and very easy to achiveve.

It was in national geographic July 09

The Pyramid Farm, designed by vertical farming guru Dickson Despommier at New York's Columbia University and Eric Ellingsen of the Illinois Institute of Technology, is one way to address the needs of a swelling population on a planet with finite farmland. Design teams around the world have been rolling out concepts for futuristic skyscrapers that house farms instead of--or in addition to--people as a means of feeding city dwellers with locally-grown crops. In addition to growing fruits and vegetables, the Pyramid Farm includes a heating and pressurization system that converts sewage into water and carbon to fuel machinery and lighting, according to Inhabitat.com.

Gordon Graff at the University of Waterloo in Ontario thinks his 59-story Skyfarm concept clears what some critics deem an insurmountable hurdle to vertical farms--generating enough electricity to replicate the sun's output at a reasonable cost. Although the hydroponic farm would consume an estimated 82 million kilowatt hours a year, according to the Toronto Star,an onsite biogas plant burning methane from farm waste would provide about 50 percent of that energy. The rest of the needed fuel could come from city waste. The Seawater Vertical Farm concept by Italian architects Cristiana Favretto and Antonio Girardi attempts to address increased demand for irrigation in an era of dwindling freshwater sources.

Knowing that different types of plants have different growth requirements, Oliver Foster of Queensland University of Technology designed the Vertical Farm-Type O concept. Heavy orchards grow atop carparks (foreground), which are linked to the main vertical farm via a skybridge. The bridge is encased in a skeletal-like structure for growing vines and for connecting services such as electricity. Reflective surfaces inside the 12-story building bounce sunlight to the back of the growing space. The Eco-Laboratory, created by Seattle, Washington-based architectural firm Weber Thompson, is a 12-story high-rise complex that would mix residences with gardens that produce food for the local neighborhood. The firm estimates that sales of tomatoes and lettuces grown in the high-rise's hydroponic gardens could total about a million U.S. dollars a year, based on revenue minus the base production costs. The economic feasibility of the design makes a real version plausible within a few years, the team notes.

New York-based Architect Blake Kurasek designed the Living Skyscraper while he was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The concept places urban farms on the outer fringes of residential apartments. Some floors are enclosed for year-round production of greenhouse crops, while others include terraces for seasonal items such as orchards. The ground floor would contain a farmers' market where residents could sell to one another and the general public.

"A vertical farm has to be adapted for a specific place," Augustin Rosenstiehl of Atelier SOA Architects in Paris told the New York Times in July 2008. For example, it would be a waste to build a vertical farm in the city only for growing wheat if the grain grows particularly well in the surrounding countryside. Rosenstiehl has therefore drawn up several concepts for growing different foods in urban environments, including the one above outfitted with rooftop wind turbines to generate electricity. -->Architect Chris Jacobs collaborated with Columbia University's Dickson Despommier to create one of the first vertical farm designs. Reminiscent of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, the concept above includes a giant rooftop solar panel that moves with the sun to capture full light. The building's windows are treated with a chemical that blocks pollutants and prevents water from beading, which maximizes the light getting in to help crops grow, according to New York magazine.

chapter two

This year, the Cuckoo didn’t sing. The song of the Cuckoo is often thought of as the first sign of Spring. It is the first time this has ever happened in living memory in our neighbourhood.
How do we make sense of something as vast as an eco-crisis? Perhaps our instinct is to look towards personal and family survival. Do we run for the hills? What should we take with us? How much land do we need to grow our own food? What do we do about energy? Is there a water supply? Obvious ins’t it, that this is a road to nowhere. In the context of a global crisis the idea of going it alone is a non-starter for almost everone on the planet, because it is immediately an unpredictable social crisis as well as an ecological one. Personal survival into the future is also community survival. We are all in this together. So we need to begin to create the conditions where our capability to maintain resilient, sustainable communities is nurtured and understood.
It is a critical moment in human history because this involves choice. It is a moment where we choose either to move towards a more sustainable way of living on planet earth, or we choose to move towards an ever more chaotic future. The nature of learning that takes place in the coming years will move us more closely towards an environmentally sustainable future, or lead us ever further from that possibility. Education is therefore a vital tool in our response to the crisis. As E.F.Schumacher (1973) once suggested, education is ‘our greatest resource’, but he also added that unless our ‘central convictions’ are made clear, education will be seen as a destructive force, taking us in the wrong direction, with the wrong fundamentals. It is not an impossible task to change this trajectory of choices and to begin to create resilient communities, human history is laced with examples of amazing ingenuity and creativity in the face of immense challenges. But it does need action on a massive scale.

We have examples. Recent times have seen considerable efforts being made to improve education and the education systems of western societies in response to the perceived needs of the knowledge society. A central feature of all of these improvements has been to respond to the needs of an ever changing commercial market and to prepare the young for participation in the global economy. This has brought reforms in both the structure and mechanism of schooling, and in the management and operation of the system. Education standards have improved. But reforms have continued to emphasise a mechanistic interpretation of the world founded on industrial and economic growth, not founded on ecological awareness. As a result schools continue to adopt a mechanistic version of learning, they progress and are managed from year to year as an age-specific body of students, they pursue a curriculum that is fragmented and largely oblivious of the significant challenges that young people will encounter as they grow up in the 21st century, they pursue individualised models of learning which marginalise interdependence and community, and they learn little of the interplay between people and environment.

This effort is I think, slightly misplaced. Our times call for interdisciplinary and holistic approaches to persistent problems, whilst individual endeavour may provide solice for the few, it is less likely to make the shift we need (see Wisdom of crowds). The challenges to our human and planetary existence cannot be addressed by purely personal ‘run to the hills’ thinking, nor for corporate, short-term solutions geared around profit first - environment second. This is not to say that we do not need to develop careful, finely grained, locally nuanced and deeply grounded knowledge and social practices of sustainable living to provide example and guidance. Such perspectives are, if anything, more critical than ever. But they need also to be situated in the wider context of longer-term, broader and deeper views that make sense across regions, nations and continents. These need to touch all aspects of all our lives, from personal to public, from work to leisure, from local to global.

One way of framing these observations is to think of what we humans generally do. In their recent work (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) illustrate this in the form of a four domains of response to the ecological crisis, consciousness, culture, behaviour and system.

Interior Exterior
individual

Crisis of consciousness
Reactive emotions
Lack of perspective-taking
Self-identity issues
Psychological domains


Crisis of behaviours
Apathy
Resource use
Consumerism
Under adherence to science




collective
Crisis of culture
Worldview clashes
Religious fundamentalism
Philosophical unclarity
Tribalism
Crisis of systems
Globalization
Political dynamics
Ineffective education
Poor regulatory inforcement

In their analysis, items within the domains of the quadrant can be seen as a point of leverage to help to overcome the eco-crisis. Whilst it is important to consider all of these different items within all of the domains they emphasise that each has a different relationship with the eco-crisis. What is interesting in their work is the way in which these domains are related to what they call different dimensions of self in response to the eco-crisis. Identifying eight different ‘selves’ they illustrate how different situations generate different types of individual response.
Eco-sage No crisis
Eco-integralist Crisis of perspective
Eco - holist Crisis of global systems
Eco - radical Crisis of biodiversity
Eco-strategist Crisis of resources
Eco-manager Crisis of management
Eco- warrior Crisis of power
Eco-guardian Crisis of harmony

A common factor emerges from their argument. The need for integration – it is simply too complex to attend on all fronts to all of these things all of the time. So a process of synthesising and integrating these overarching themes generates focus and enables us to consider forms of identity, action, communion and membership (ibid p313).
interior exterior
individual


Integral identity
The experience of ecological awareness


Integral action
The behaviors that result from ecological awareness


collective Integral communion
Relationships that emerge out of ecological awareness Integral membership
Roles within eco-social systems that express ecological awareness

I find this taxonomy extremely useful in framing the ways in which we might begin to explore the different and sometimes confusing ecological debates.







Another way of thinking about this issue is to consider the ecological, economic and equitable footprint of individuals, or to put it simply - the amount of land that each person requires to sustain their lifestyle. A fair ‘earth share’ is approximately 1.7 hectares per person on the planet, that is the amount of land that is available to live on divided by the number of people on the planet. On average a person’s footprint in Britain uses about 5.6 hectares . It means that if everyone in the world lived like the average person in Britain we would need 2.7 planets of earth size to sustain life for us all to survive. The whole thing works at the moment because a majority of people in the developing world live on less than their fair ‘earth share’ but as global warming increases this effect is magnified as areas that were previously habitable become unfit for nurturing life. Inevitably, many people with less aspire to more, and it raises some tricky questions for individuals, organisations and governments. For more of the planets population to have a fair earth share implies that those of us who take more of our share will need to take less - to reduce our consumption, or as we might see later, to redefine how we consume so that whatever we consume is part of a tight eco-cycle where we re-use, or biodegrade. This has major implications for what we educate ourselves, and our future generations into thinking about how in relation to life on planet earth.

A further way of engaging with the eco-crisis comes through an equitable approach to the problems of economy and society. In their recent work The Spirit Level, (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett explore in considerable detail why more equal societies seem to flourish in almost every aspect of human activity, ranging across such matters as improved physical health and life expectancy, higher educational performance, to reduced occurance of violent behaviour and increased levels of social mobility.
The authors argue that there is evidence to suggest that individuals that place a high level of value on material wealth increasingly find themselves more anxiety-ridden, depressed, concerned about how people think of them and generally live in a state of continuous self doubt and insecurity. It is a theme that has featured in the recent work of other authors such as Oliver James and Tobias Jones in the form of affluence, and its negative effects on happiness, and community and the destructive trend of individualism. In Wilkinson and Pickett’s work they cite a study from the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation in the USA which suggests that people in the USA – the bastion of capitalism and free market, report that they feel that ‘materialism comes between them and the satisfaction of the social needs’ (ibid p.3). The report called Yearning for Balance, concluded that Americans were ‘deeply ambivalent about wealth and material gain’. A large majority of people were more interested in moving towards a society which ‘moved away from greed and excess toward a way of life more centered on values, community, and family.’ (p4). The fascinating and revealing observation however, is not that this was a declared ambition for a majority of those interviewed, but that ‘they felt that those priorities (of values,community and family) were not shared by most of their fellow Americans, who, they believed, had become increasingly atomised, selfish and irresponsible.’ (p4) The resulting sense of alienation and disconnect from each other was often cited as a result of these feelings. When people were brought together to discuss and explore these issues there was a sense of relief, surprise and excitement to discover that other people felt much the same way. Their private concerns were in fact collective concerns, but for some reason they were not part of the collective conversation about how people might live together. In effect they illustrate that there is a crisis of consciousness and behaviour that is being individually lived out which has a direct impact upon culture and system, this is however iterative, as systems and culture send messages to the individual which in turn frame and define their behavior and conscious actions.

As material success and social failure is a persistent challenge in many Western economies it seems sensible to explore further into ways in which our responses to these issues might connect to other pressing challenges. As Wilkinson and Pickett argue; …’it suggests that, if we are to gain further improvements in the real quality of life, we need to shift attention from material standards and economic growth to ways of improving the psychological and social wellbeing of whole societies.’ (p4)
This is not to deny that economic activity is very important, but to explore and to create ways in which economic activity, which pays the bills and puts food on the table, can be better shaped into a way of looking at social equity and environmental pressures in such a way as all these different agendas and demands are brought into sharper focus and unity of purpose. Why tackle psychological wellbeing, economic and community dysfunction as individual problems, why not explore it as something in the form of a pathology on a more collective level and link it closely to a redefinition of the economic needs a country, a continent, a planet may functionally require?

Messing with your mind. The plants in the planters by the canal are there for anyone to use, but primarily they are available for the people who pass by on the canal in their barges. The thing is that people were not sure if they could use them. Who do we pay for the lettuce? How much are the herbs? They are free. Use them. Think about it.

I want to focus a little longer on Wilkinson and Picketts work, as it sets one significant parameter on this book. They argue that we are drawing close to the end of what economic growth can do in the form of improving the quality of human life through the raising of living standards in most industrially developed countries. Using a series of illustrations they explain how life expectancy has a relationship to gross national income per head. In poorer countries, life expectancy increases rapidly during the early stages of economic development. But, from the point where countries reach a middle income level the rate of life expectancy begins to slow down until in the case of countries that are the richest in the world, their financial richness adds nothing further to life expectancy. So we may be rich, and get ever richer, but we will not live any longer because of that richness. It is not the connection of GNI to life expectancy, rather it is that as countries move further up the scale of richness, the corresponding increases in living standards do little for health. This is interesting, as it raises important questions about the relentless emphasis on betterment through financial wealth in already rich countries, and enable us to consider at what point would it be strategically beneficial to emphasise other, equally important ‘wealth’ indicators – examples might be more time to spend with family and friends, more opportunity to participate in a community activity, opportunity to attend a night class and learn a craft, opportunity to read a book, or to go walking, to invent something, or to visit a museum. They continue, ‘…whether we look at health, happiness or other measures of wellbeing there is a consistent picture. In poorer countries, economic development continues to be very important for human health and wellbeing. Increases in material living standards result in substantial improvements in both objective measures of wellbeing like life expectancy, and in subjective ones like happiness in poor countries. But as nations join the ranks of the affluent developed countries, further increases in personal income count for less and less. I will come to the implications of consumption, continuous growth and equity again later, but the obvious implication is that equitable financial wealth rather than disproportionate levels of wealth would seem to matter within countries and communities. But there are other issues related to inequality which are of significance in our discussion.

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam (2000) describes how inequality relates to social capital. ‘Community and equality are mutually reinforcing…social capital and economic equality moved in tandem through most of the twentieth century. In terms of the distribution of wealth and income, America in the 1950’s and 1960’s was more egalitarian than it had been in more than a century…those same decades were also the high point of social connectedness and civic engagement. Record highs in equality and social capital coincided…Conversely, the last third of the twentieth century was a time of growing inequality and eroding social capital…The timing of the two trends is striking: Sometime around 1965-70 America reversed course and started becoming both less just economically and less well connected socially and politically. (p359).
Puttnam’s work raises the importance of trust in a period of change. Communities of people that trust themselves have some interesting fringe benefits – first of all, people live longer in them. But they are not necessarily the panacea we might anticipate. As Subramanian (Subramanian et al 2002) argues, ‘people who trust others benefit from living in communities with generally high levels of trust.’ So we have the possibility that perhaps we need to teach commuity more explicitly in the form of community related actions, where financial gain is not the common denominator, but where connection, social support, fun, experimentation with the physical place which people share, all forms of community action become lessons which facilitate a trusting capability. In itself, community breeds community. We see this in the exponential rise of the internet social networking sites such as Facebook. But such examples also illustrate another fascinating aspect of community – that it can be both virtual and physical. It is clear that different forms of community can and do exist within which people can continue to benefit from connections which in turn generate trust, leading to experimentation, innovation and change.

Incredible edible gets about 5000 hits each week from people from around the planet who are interested in what we are doing. In most cases these connections remain virtual, they never extend to physical connection, and yet they serve as part of the fabric of change to which we are contributing. A small number of these connections convert into deeper conversations and exchanges of ideas and information, sometimes relating to physical locations of their own across continents, sometimes simply in the pursuit of ideas and designs for further development and study. It is, I think, a form of wealth production – community wealth.

Trust is an important capability that can help to create a more cohesive and cooperative social fabric. It creates less of ‘them’ and more of ‘us’, in the community mind and therefore serves as one important indicator of ways in which we look to see if any effort to influence and change a community is having an impact. If we are to tackle some of the considerable challenges associated with environmental change such as climate change, our need for trust, cooperation, furthered significantly by more equitable use of available resources would seem to have an important role to play. As Wilkinson and Puttnam convincingly demonstrate in their work, further improvement in the quality of life does not depend upon continuous economic growth, they make it very clear that the issue is now community, and how we can learn to relate to one another in much more productive, equitable, coherent and convivial ways.
In reaching this community goal, it is also clear in their work that there is a need for a shift in public values, where ‘conspicuous consumption is seen as part of the problem, a sign of greed and unfairness which damages society and the planet.’ (p263). This attention on a shift from the material to the relational, forms the foundation upon which our considerations are based. It denies neiher of them, but it emphasises the significance of one over the other.

new Boats album

Andrew and Craig have released their new album on Home Normal label - Words are something else. Wonderful!

Prince Charles speech to the SDC

A speech by HRH The Prince Of Wales to The Sustainable Development Commission’s ‘Breakthroughs for the twenty first century’ conference

1st July 2009
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great pleasure to join you today – and not just because I am hugely encouraged that the Sustainable Development Commission has been looking for breakthroughs for the 21st Century and we certainly need plenty of those!, but largely because it gives me an opportunity to congratulate Jonathon Porritt on his role as the first chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission.
Jonathon or Sir Jonathon Bt., as I like to call him occasionally! has been, as everyone knows, an extraordinarily brave champion for the environment over many years. Indeed, I first came across him when he was considered a dangerous radical involved with what was then thought to be rather an alarming organization. That was well over two decades ago when it was distinctly unfashionable to be talking about climate change, biodiversity and sustainable agriculture. Now associating with dangerous radicals is of course a hazardous pastime. But how things have changed (he is now a much older radical! for a start and the fact that some of these things have changed is in large part due to Jonathon’s courage, determination and foresight, and he is owed the greatest possible debt of gratitude by us all for all his efforts.
Having said that, I also want to congratulate the more than 300 people who put pen to paper and submitted breakthrough ideas to the Commission. If only I’d known, it took me sometime to catch up with exactly what was going on here today, I would have submitted quite a lot of ideas of my own and from my organisations. It would certainly be interesting to see if any of their suggestions end up being put into practice.
This country has always excelled at producing great ideas. We just need to ensure that they are followed through. But that’s not so easy to achieve. I remember going to the United States thirty-something years ago and coming across a fascinating example of extracting methane from a landfill site before they then regenerated that landfill site and turned it into a golf course. The methane was being used for energy. I cam back to this country thinking what an interesting idea and tried to see if I could get some interest but it was just too early to achieve any kind of response.
Of course, sustainable development has never been an ‘easy’ concept. But few of the things that really matter in life are ‘easy’. Sustainability is difficult to define and difficult to achieve. That doesn’t make it any less important as an organizing principle of humanity for the 21st century.
I think it might actually be simpler to look at a list of the things that are clearly not sustainable about the way our species is currently living on its one and only planet. Most people would probably now start that list with the way much of the world’s banking system has been operated in recent years. The list would then go on to look at the giant global experiment we are conducting with the world’s climate and indeed with Nature herself. As a reminder, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you Ladies and Gentlemen here today, the latest science suggests that unless greenhouse gas emissions reach their absolute peak within about 96 months – yes, months – it may well be too late to stop temperatures rising to dangerous levels with all the terrifying consequences that will have for the whole of humanity. It isn’t very long at all when you think about it.
But the list of unsustainable human activities simply goes on and on from there. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was the most comprehensive stock-take of Nature ever undertaken. It revealed that roughly sixty per cent of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth – such as fresh water, wild fisheries, air and water regulation, regional climatic regulation and natural pest control – are being degraded or used unsustainably.
The review looked at twenty-four different ecosystem services and found that fifteen of them are suffering ongoing degradation. It concluded that humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively in the last fifty years than in any other period. More land was converted to cropland in the thirty years after 1950 than in the 150 years between 1700 and 1850. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, first made in 1913, ever used on the planet has been used since 1985. As a result of our collective demands, some ten to thirty per cent of the mammal, bird and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction. These facts are all truly frightening, and yet it is increasingly hard to understand why the whole world is not as gripped by this disaster as it was by the global banking collapse. Not least because, and this is the trouble, the long-term effects will be far, far more severe for every man, woman and child on this planet.
So, yes, we do need some breakthroughs. But we need breakthroughs in thinking and in mind sets, as well as in actions. Sustainability by its very nature is about integration, about weighing up all the factors, with a broad approach. Yet in today’s world that is a big disadvantage. I vividly remember asking in the run up to a visit to the European Commission, about 15-20 years ago, if I could meet the Agriculture and Environment Committees together to talk about sustainable agriculture. When my office put this request forward there was a long, appalled silence, followed by the suggestion that ‘Perhaps His Royal Highness doesn’t understand. The Agriculture Committee looks after Agriculture, and the Environment Committee looks after Environment, so what would they have to talk about?’ Needless to say, we did have a joint meeting and it went rather well. But I think you will find that that was the last time they ever met together.
The Sustainable Development Commission has, I know, done a huge amount to encourage integrated thinking. But the question of who ‘owns’ sustainability still seems to come up with alarming regularity – in Governments, in companies, among agencies and with the general public. The answer, of course, has to be that something so fundamental has to be ‘owned’ by each and every one of us, whether at home or at work. But that approach doesn’t fit well with the silo-thinking that still, whatever anyone says, dominates in most walks of life and expects someone to be nominated as ‘in charge’.
Another dimension of sustainability is that it tends not to produce clear-cut opportunities that can be developed and exploited in a conventional manner in market economies. It requires the joining up of disparate ideas, working across cultures and frequently across national boundaries. And it may mean taking some risks. Not everything is going to work.
In so many ways sustainability requires working against the grain of much of contemporary society.
It feeds on better inter-disciplinary understanding and breadth of vision – in a world of ever-increasing specialization – and on new and more open dialogues –
in a world that looks increasingly inwards.
It is easy, too, to see why sustainability, despite good intentions, all too often just doesn’t happen. Poorly designed incentives take people in the wrong direction; the need to deliver quick results for shareholders or electors can drive short-term thinking; or narrow ambition over-rides the precautionary principle. Indeed, this is precisely why I started my Accounting for Sustainability Project some five years ago.
If you think about it, when business or investment decisions are taken there is never a shortage of information about the financial dimension. We can see, for example, the prices of financial assets and the quantum of lending in a clear and measured way. However, the consequences of climate change and of over-consumption of finite natural resources are not as visible and quantified; and to add to this our current systems of reporting and accounting are too focussed on measuring short-term financial impacts, with values rarely given to the ecosystem services which, at the end of the day, sustain us. In other words, we lack the tools and systems to assess and report information about broader and longer term issues which, in the great scheme of things, are so much more important for us, and for our children and grandchildren, than any earnings per share or debt to equity ratio. The point of my Accounting for Sustainability Project is to help tackle this issue and ensure that sustainability is not just talked and worried about, so that it becomes “business as usual with very small green knobs on”, but becomes embedded in organizations’ ‘DNA’.
I am delighted that my Project Team, with the help of the wide range of companies, government departments and accountancy bodies that are very kindly working with us, is helping to develop the tools needed to survive and prosper in the face of the “sustainability revolution”.
To give a very simple and, I am sure, well-worn example: we buy tomatoes grown in Southern Europe at good prices because the water used to grow them is not charged for fully. As a result, the water is being over-consumed and is rapidly running out, and those involved in the sector will in due course lose their livelihoods and we will face a shortage of tomatoes, which will become very much more expensive.
And, of course, it isn’t just manufacturing and producing companies that need better information to understand sustainability issues. When I was in Indonesia last year I happened to spot in the local English language newspaper an article about banks lending to companies that are cutting down the world’s great tropical rainforests to produce palm-oil. As many of you will know, the rainforests are the world’s life-support system, generating and storing much of the freshwater needed to grow food, fostering biodiversity on which mankind ultimately depends and providing livelihoods for hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people. And to cap it all, deforestation contributes about twenty per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – that’s more than the entire worldwide transport sector – and is the third largest contributor to climate change. In other words, banks, and financial institutions generally, also urgently need the tools and systems to be able to understand more clearly the longer-term and broader consequences of their lending and investment decisions
The whole point is that the environmental, social and economic challenges we face are linked. They cannot be addressed separately, however convenient that may seem to be. The links between them are so strong that the integrated solutions of sustainable development are essential in addressing the underlying issues. Issues such as energy and water, housing, health, land-use, transport and food and farming have to be addressed together.
In this way, it will be possible to deliver real benefits to developing communities which neither destroy the planet’s resources, nor shatter the very communities we are actually trying to help. For the concept of sustainable development is, of course, also about people and their needs. Surely it is not beyond the wit of man to discover these solutions and to follow a path of development which will genuinely bring us forward.
I might however, just at this point, make it clear that I do not believe we should put all our eggs in the ‘techno-fix’ solutions basket. Of course we need to use all our power and ingenuity to find answers to the problems we face. But we do need to be careful that the cure is not worse than the disease at the end of the day.
I believe the challenge for the scientific community today is be at least as creative as it has in the past, but to develop solutions that respect the boundaries defined by sustainability considerations. For instance, there are huge opportunities for intelligent electricity distribution, with decentralized pathways and energy produced close to where it is consumed. This would maximize the potential for renewable energy and allow both heat and power from energy generation to be utilized. Finding a breakthrough that would achieve this at minimum cost will be a major challenge, but probably a good deal more sensible than geo-engineering. And incidentally Ladies and gentlemen, I was fascinated by some of the people I met just outside before I came in here with their ideas. Some of which were particularly interesting and valuable.
We should also, dare I say it, not dismiss old ideas. I was delighted to see that ‘biochar’, used by traditional peoples in the Amazon for tens of thousands of years to enhance soil fertility, is advocated in at least a couple of the breakthrough suggestions, but with the added dimension that it could sequester carbon in the soil on a huge scale.
I also remember seeing an inspiring example of sustainability in Northern India. Traditional, village-based systems of harvesting the monsoon rains, developed over thousands of years, fell into disrepair in the 1950s when powerful pumps allowed groundwater to be extracted instead. But this was an unsustainable short-term solution. The groundwater was not being replenished. Levels dropped below the reach of the pumps, irrigation became impossible and the villages began to decline as people drifted away to look for work in the cities. The breakthrough here was advocated and led by a remarkable man called Rajendra Singh. He encouraged a local self-help approach to rebuilding the ancient system of dams and ponds and started harvesting the monsoon once again. Groundwater levels crept back up, having disappeared almost entirely. Previously dried up rivers started flowing again and, twenty years later, more than half a million people in Rajasthan benefit from this particular example of sustainability in action. What this example also shows is that where we learn to work with Nature rather than against her, we can live more sustainably. And as we all work to rebuild the global economy, it is perhaps just worth recalling what the economist Herman Daly wrote about the natural world, he said “it is the envelope that contains, sustains and provisions the economy” – not the other way around’. To be truly sustainable we have to begin by understanding that we can no longer live off Nature’s capital. Once it is gone, it cannot be replenished.
So we need to put Nature’s capital and community capital at the heart of a reformed approach to economics which recognizes that the current system is inherently unsustainable and in many ways the cause of many of the problems threatening to overwhelm us.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are a frighteningly long way from establishing sustainability as the central organizing principle in the battle for survival of our species. But the potential breakthroughs showcased here today and the work which the Sustainable Development Commission has done under Jonathon’s inspired leadership show just what could be done if we have the courage to harness human ingenuity, take a few risks, break the straightjacket of conventional thinking and – above all – take the long-term view that our descendants will surely expect of us.