‘Partial’ stimulation lacks sustainability

Now that sustainability has the attention of everyone from the White House on down, we need to make sure it gets some meaning—and quick. With the rise of advertising and PR for “green products,” the concept of sustainability has become completely convoluted in the United States.

PR professionals have served their clients well, and, however unintentionally, seriously undermined the concept of sustainability. It might make you feel better about them, but Chevron’s personal responsibility-focused ad campaign—“I will unplug stuff more”—is not going to get us far.

Today in the U.S., too many people and businesses have bought into the concept of “partial sustainability.” However, long-term environmental sustainability is a concept that fundamentally has to be based on science and measurement.

In simple terms, in order to be truly sustainable, we need to be in equilibrium with our environment in terms of the inputs and outputs (e.g. CO2 emissions). Swedish scientist Dr. Karl-Henrick Robert has been touring the world for 20 years describing the four simple system conditions of The Natural Step, his science-based sustainability framework.

Yet every time I hear him speak, like last October at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in Portland, it wrenches me back to the reality that there really is a simple equation here, and if we don’t follow it, we’re not sustainable. And if we’re not sustainable, even a small amount at first, the disparity grows and grows and then we have the crisis situation we’re facing now with respect to climate change, and could soon be facing with respect to water, fisheries and farming (some say we’re already in crisis in these areas).

If the key participants in U.S. society would accept the simple scientific premise of sustainability, then we could all work much more constructively to achieve the goals of implementation. However, for all of the talk and ad campaigns, business in particular is a far, far cry from joining in. Policymakers in the White House, state capitals and company boardrooms should focus the first half of 2009 on getting agreement on this concept.