It seems like there’s a book being published every week that addresses the case for sustainable business and economics. I try to keep up, but seldom finish reading one. I have to admit that I often find myself feeling bored and empty, as if I’m hungry for steak and have nothing in the cupboard but rice cakes.
For me, what’s missing is an understanding about how we got here in the first place. How are our behavior and our economic systems rooted in more fundamental assumptions about reality – the way we see, and who we think we are? Most of the sustainability conversations focus on the level of matter and energy – we take stuff from the earth, do something to it to add economic value, distribute it, use it, and throw it away. This is the stuff of life cycle assessment. This view of reality is incredibly valuable, and necessary. And it’s not the whole picture.
It’s great to reduce energy use and reduce packaging, but somehow I doubt that’s going to be enough to achieve change at the level we need.
I attended a fascinating presentation the other night called Integral Sustainability in Action by a group of graduates from Naropa University’s excellent Environmental Leadership program.
They have applied Integral Theory to questions of sustainability, drawing on the work of Barrett Brown in particular. I won’t attempt to describe Integral Theory here - Barrett does a great job of it on his site.
In a very comprehensive paper, Barrett did a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the most popular books about sustainability, and found that, by and large, the semantic focus is almost exclusively on the lower right quadrant – that is, the large scale systemic economic, political, and technological issues that enable or hinder progress. The beauty of Integral Theory is that it gives us a framework to understand that this is a necessary, but not sufficient, way to understand, diagnose, and prescribe actions to resolve the large scale problems we face.
Why? Because it only addresses one aspect of the problem, albeit an important one. Beneath all the talk about reducing energy use, creating green businesses and a green workforce, respecting biodiversity, and having healthy communities, there are fundamental assumptions about who we think we are – our consciousness, what we pay attention to, our values, our motivations. This is the domain of cosmology.
This is not the stuff of science and engineering, but of philosophy, spirituality or religion. Increasingly, spiritual leaders from a number of traditions have begun to address this. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche summed up the Buddhist perspective:
“Our precious planet and the innumerable beings who dwell here face an unprecedented crisis. The escalating threat to the world’s environment and climate stem from a profound predicament that affects all humanity. We are ever more rapidly losing our connection with the sacred nature of our world. This tragedy affects us in so many ways, but at its heart, it is a crisis of the spirit. We are harming our planet and fellow beings because we are losing touch with the basic goodness of our own sacred being.”
In the Christian tradition, Fr. Thomas Berry has been a leader in what is termed the New Cosmology. This begins with an inquiry into how our spiritual estrangement from the earth is intimately tied into our technological culture. Fr. Berry proposes a reunification of science and religion through what he terms Earth Spirituality. This is a doctrine of radical respect for the ourselves as well as the other beings of this earth, with very profound implications for science, technology and law
We have lived with a utilitarian assumption that others are here for our own benefit, whether it’s animals, ecosystems, or other people. This is both a spiritual, and a practical problem. There’s just not enough to go around anymore.
Next post: Bringing it down to earth: how do we incorporate this thinking into the realm of practical business planning, performance, and leadership?