The Sustainist

Resources Must Flow

California, where I live, has been getting a lot of rain. All this water reminds me of a Chinese saying I grew up with: “Water is Money.” I often heard it as a joke, especially when it is raining – all the rain becomes a wish or a symbol of financial abundance. In spoken Cantonese, I also heard people use the word “water” in place of money.  Perhaps, we should think of the currency of money like water – it should move and flow.  In the summer, I made sure that there are no pools of stagnant water around the house because they will be a breeding environment for mosquitoes and other insects that might carry diseases. When water doesn’t flow, it because opportunities for destructive things to grow. In other words, it turns rotten. I would say the same thing goes for money and resources: when they are not flowing, or when we hold onto them, they turn rotten and become breeding pools for trouble and unsustainability.

There was the same amount of money in existence before and after the recent financial crisis of the United States. Where did the money go? Some people in the financial “industry” had been reaping benefits from the inflated financial transactions for years, but instead of re-circulating the money back into the system, especially back to the investors, they held on to it and stopped the flow. And it turned rotten and it is stinking up the whole country.

The “problem” with Qaddafi in Libya can be understood this way: he, his family and regime, have been reaping the benefits from their oil-rich land for years and they are holding on to the money and resources and not letting them flow back into the people of the land. And the people suffered and are dissatisfied. When resources don’t flow, even a rich country is not sustainable, as we observed the unfolding political “mess” in Libya, which now involves international military interventions.

Qaddafi can resolve this problem in a very simple way: let go of the money, power and resources and share them with the people of Libya. Let the resource flow again and your country will be sustainable politically and financially.

A sustainist does not hold on to power and resources but releases them and shares them so that they can flow like water, interacting with other elements/gifts in the communities, creating “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I was working with two local churches last week. One of the exercises we did was to make a list of ministries that churches are already doing and another list consisting of places where people gather in the surrounding neighborhood. Teams of church members were asked to randomly pick one item from each list and create an innovative ministry. One team was given “Walmart” on the one hand and “Feeding the Homeless” the other.  As we discussed what creative ministries we can create from connecting the two, this idea emerged. Church leaders could go to the management at their local Walmart and make this proposal: Since so many people in our neighborhood shop at Walmart, with all the money that Walmart made, in what ways can Walmart give back to the community? The church would provide concrete ways that Walmart can participate including help for the homeless.

 A sustainist community leader pays attention to where the local money and resources go.  If resources and money only flow one-way and doesn’t return in any forms back to the community, your community will be not be sustainable. That means someone or some group is holding onto the resource. Follow the money and resources and you will find out whom or what is stopping the flow. And then find ways to challenge the ones that are holding on and invite them to release and re-circulate the resources back into the local community.

 

The Ancient-Future-Now

Our planet earth has a destructive side. We all saw it last week– the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Eventually, the earth will find its equilibrium again. It will heal itself in the passing of the seasons to come. So will humanity; the human spirit will endure and prevail, working through grief and loss, and eventually find footing again. We learn from the earth, our only home; we will die and rise again through the seasons of the generations to come.

But something is different about the third of this so-called triple disaster in Japan. The nuclear crisis has overshadowed the strength, courage, hope, and resiliency of human communities coming and working together, that had risen in the first two natural disasters. While I admire the spirit of the 50 faceless workers who willingly put themselves in danger to contain the nuclear disaster to save others, I fear their sacrifice would not solve the long-term problem for future generations. They could only contain the disaster temporarily. As I heard about the contamination of the water and food supplies, I felt a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. This human-made crisis killed my optimism as I watched helicopters dump water into a reactor building where water levels in a cooling pool for spent fuel rods was dangerously low. Wait a minute! “Spent fuel rods” – these are code words for nuclear wastes. What are nuclear wastes doing next to nuclear reactors? So I did some research and here is what I found.  

A New York Times article by Keith Bradsher and Hiroko Tabuchi on March 17 headlined: Greater Danger Lies in Spent Fuel Than in Reactors. The article opens with “Years of procrastination in deciding on long-term disposal of highly radioactive fuel rods from nuclear reactors are now coming back to haunt Japanese authorities as they try to control fires and explosions at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.” Tokyo Electric Power said that a total of 11,125 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site. That is about four times as much radioactive material as in the reactor cores combined. The most disturbing fact for me is that these cooling pools were supposed to be temporary.

So just how dangerous are these spent fuel rods? Spent fuel rods contain fission products that emit beta and gamma radiation, and actinides that emit alpha particles, such as uranium-234, neptunium-237, plutonium-238 and americium-241. Uranium-234 has a half-life of 346,000 years!  Neptunium-236 has a half-life of 154,000 years.  In plain language, this means that these spent fuel rods will be emitting dangerous radiation for over 150,000+ years! 

How shortsighted are we to keep something that dangerous for that long in a temporary storage pool of water?  The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this on its website:

There are two acceptable storage methods for spent fuel after it is removed from the reactor core:

• Spent Fuel Pools - Currently, most spent nuclear fuel is safely stored in specially designed pools at individual reactor sites around the country.
• Dry Cask Storage - If pool capacity is reached, licensees may move toward use of above-ground dry storage casks.

For 150,000+ years!  No container or cooling system can last that long. This nature-induced human-made disaster in Japan exposes the short-termism that has been reigning in our time. Are the short-term gains so great that we don’t need to think about the wellbeing of the next 30,000 generations?  And what happened to the money that was made by these private nuclear power companies in the last 40 years? (The Fukushima Daiichi power plant had been in operation since 1970.)  Shouldn’t they have invested some of the billions of dollars back into solving this long-term problem since they had created it and benefited financially from it?  In a 40-year time period, shouldn’t we have found a safe way to recycle the nuclear waste by now?  And if they had tried, and the solution was still to put them in pools of water, then should we have even started the process in the first place?

A sustainist will never start to draw a plan to build a nuclear power plant until he/she has solved the problem of re-cycling the waste – because a sustainist takes a long-term view of the future and not just interests in immediate gains.     

Stewart Brand, author of The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, wrote,

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.  The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distraction of personal multitasking.” 

He proposed a “large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes.  It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”  By building the slowest computer in the world, Brand wants to challenge us to make “long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.” He also wants to create a "Ten-Thousand Year Library," to preserve enormous amounts of knowledge from history and other long-perspective disciplines.

“Sustainism (re-)connects the present to history and the future to the present. It’s temporal perspective incorporates future generations . . .”  (Quote from Sustainism Is the New Modernism by Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers.)

This perspective of time is not new. Take a look at this text from the Hebrew Bible:

A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:4)

This psalm was attributed to Moses. If this is true, this text is about 3,500 years old. This poem/song/prayer has been recited/sung regularly in the Jewish community for thousands of years. About 1,500 years later, another text in the Christian bible said this:

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. (2 Peter 3:8)

In Judeo-Christian tradition, God’s “now” includes at least 1,000 years in the past and 1,000 years in the future. A sustainable community teaches its people to practice this Ancient-Future-Now spirituality. It is a discipline of learning from the past, reaping the wisdom, knowledge, and gifts of the successes and failures of past generations and at the same time, imagining the wellbeing of future generations as we act in the presence. How can this Ancient-Future-Now impact our daily action and decision? How can we teach this as a spiritual discipline for our community today?

Here is a sustainist leadership skill that practices the Ancient-Future-Now spirituality:

Before arriving at a decision,

• First, invite people in the community to research using our global network to discover failures and successes in the past in addressing the issue at hand. 

• Second, engage them in a time of analysis of these discoveries putting them in the present context to reach a number of options to be considered.

• Third, invite them to imagine how each option may impact the wellbeing of future generations. Based on these explorations of the past and future, decide what is the best course of action.

Eric H. F. Law
Kaleidoscope Institute
www.kscopeinstitute.org

 

 

 

Network Globally-Connect Locally

Reflections on the Earthquake/Tsunami in Japan:

Thursday Morning (March 10, 2011), I was driving to my office and the headline news on the radio was Charlie Sheen suing Warner Brothers for 100 million dollars.  The next news item was Lindsay Lohan’s case of the stolen necklace. I thought to myself, “Why should we care?  Why are our news organizations using valuable airtime to tell us this?  If we are people who think this so-called news is important, what does this say about our values?”

Thursday night, a friend called to tell me to turn on the TV. An 8.9 earthquake hit Japan and huge tsunamis were destroying everything in their paths. My Facebook friends were praying for the people in Japan almost immediately after the earthquake hit.  My EAM (Episcopal Asia-American Ministry) network was buzzing with emails to and from Japan.  Every TV station was showing the latest images from the disaster. I was mesmerized by the images.

Friday morning, the TV stations continued their non-stop coverage. While I was horrified by the death and destruction, I was relieved to notice that Charlie and Lindsay were not in the news at all. The disaster had reset our value system. An earthquake does not care how much money I have. A tsunami pays no attention to how powerful I am. Disasters strip away the roles that we play in our human-constructed society. During a natural disaster, we are all just human beings doing what we can to survive. No matter how much we want to believe that we are autonomous, a natural disaster forces us to acknowledge that we are interdependent. In order to survive, we have to help each other and work together as one community.

Friday morning, non-stop news coverage continued. We were told the earthquake in Japan was sending tsunami waves across the pacific, and 4,500 miles and 9 hours later, they caused major damages in Crescent City, California. The tsunamis physically reminded us that we are all connected. This interconnectedness became even more apparent when social media and the Internet gave us instant information and images of what was happening in Japan from the people’s perspectives. From this place of connectedness, we want to help. Countries with search and rescue resources were dispatching teams to Japan to assist. We set up donation centers for people to offer their financial assistance in this effort. Why does it take a disaster for us see our interconnectedness?  What would the world be like if we acknowledge our interdependence all the time and act accordingly?

Friday night, ABC Late Night news spent over half of its broadcast time on Japan. Now they were worrying about the nuclear power plant. Then, there was a switch in focus; we were now talking about the nuclear power plants in California. Are we prepared for an earthquake that size? Can our nuclear power plants withstand a tsunami that strong? The global network allowed local communities to share knowledge -- in this case, knowledge that will enhance other local communities’ ability to survive.

As I observed how our networked world responded to this natural and human-made disaster, I saw sustainism at work. (From Sustainism is the New Modernism by Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers.) A sustainist networks globally – to share knowledge and experience, but connects locally to create a sustainable community using the shared knowledge. In this cycle of acting locally and sharing globally, sustainist communities are not isolated but can move together across nations, states, and social boundaries, affecting local change and possible global transformation.

Sunday night, I was driving home from dinner and Charlie Sheen and his 100 million dollar lawsuit was back on the news again after we were told about the 2^nd explosion at the nuclear power plant in Japan.  Before the heightened sense of interconnectedness fades away, before the great earthquake in Japan of 2011 becomes background noise to be ignored, I invite our communities to take this opportunity to act locally to acknowledge the interdependence of humanity. A sustainable community lives out this interconnectedness everyday. A sustainable community doesn’t need another disaster to remind us of our interdependence. And when a disaster does hit, people in a sustainable community will be prepared to support and help each other through the hardships that may occur.

Here is a sustainist idea that local communities can do. Gather the people in your community center, library, church, synagogue, mosque or temple. Make sure you invite people from difference segments of your community – local businesses, civic organizations, schools, sports clubs, religious communities, etc. I would suggest the following agenda:

1. Engage people in a dialogue about how the recent disaster in Japan had impacted their lives. What are their fears? This is especially important to help children deal with their fear after having seen the destruction shown in the media.
2. Invite representatives from the local Red Cross, Fire Departments, and Police Departments to inform the gathering what to do in case of a disaster. If there is an existing up-to-date emergency procedure, review them. If there is not, invite the community to take steps in creating these procedures – where to go, what to do, what communication technology is available, etc. Engage people in a dialogue on disaster preparedness.
3. Most importantly, help people in your community get to know each other and connect locally, building relationships that are mutually supportive.  Ultimately, it is the relationships that we have with each other that will get us through any disaster. In this spirit, invite people to come back, perhaps monthly, to continue the networking and dialogue.

Eric H. F. Law
Kaleidoscope Institute
www.kscopeinstitute.org

 

 

Waste = Resource

Alberto Sanchez noticed that the accumulation of chicken waste was becoming a major problem for the poultry industries in Costa Rica. He created a process to convert chicken waste into organic fertilizer, a product branded as Biofert. Four years later, the poultry producers, who were supplying the chicken waste for him, bought him out and integrated the organic fertilizer production into their business. Aside from the ethnical issue around the forced sales of his business, I want to point out that Alberto Sanchez had a different mindset about waste. (I got this story from the book, Earth, Inc., by Gergory Unruh, pp.110-111) He saw waste as a resource. He used technology to recycle what others considered waste and a problem, into something useful--something of value for the community. In other words, his approach was not linear but cyclical.

From the same book, Earth, Inc., where I found Sanchez’s story, the author, Gregory Unruh, proposed that industries move away from the linear approach of production to that of a cyclical one. He contrasts the model used by what the industry calls the “value chain,” a term corned by Michael Porter in his 1985 book Competitive Advantage, with a process more akin to nature’s “value cycle.” Environmental scientists colloquially called the value chain a “take-make-waste” system. “The production process takes resources from the environment, makes them into products but also creates waste – including the product itself at the end of its life – and sends all this waste to the landfill.” (Unruh, p. xii)

As we look at our world using this linear process today, consider the following questions:

• Who worked to extract the raw material from the earth?
• Who worked to turn these so-called low-value raw materials into so-called “high-value” products?
• Where did the waste from the production process go?
• Who bought and enjoyed these products?
• Who made the money selling them?
• When these products came to the end of their lives, whose communities became the dumps for these wastes? 

As you consider these questions, I hope you will see the injustice that is often part of this linear value chain practice and why so many local communities are not sustainable.

In contrast, in nature,

“There is no linear value chain extracting resources and spewing out wastes. Within nature’s value cycle, a select number of raw materials are constantly reused –and never lost value. They are literally reincarnated cyclically into new beings. Nature’s material assets are churned over and over in a process of never-ending propagation. And the system never stands still. It is constantly innovating and evolving to become more complex, specialized, and effective.” (Unruh, p. xvi-xvii) 

A sustainist thinks cyclically, emulating nature’s value cycle.  Materials are to be recycled and reused rather than replaced and thrown away.  Waste becomes resource.  That is why sustainists seem to be able to make miracles happen, creating something out of nothing.  Do more with less.  In sustainable communities, people and their gifts are to be re-circulated and re-appreciated, rather than used, replaced and thrown away. 

So, where do we begin to create sustainable communities? How can we transform a world that is still dominated by the linear value chain practice, often resulting in various forms of unsustainable communities? One way to begin is to identify the wastes in your community. What do people throw away? Now, reorient your mindset to think of these wastes as resources. How can your community transform these resources into something valuable and useful for your community? In other words, recycle them.  

Here is one idea to consider especially for organizations (churches, community centers, etc.) that have a thrift shop and people who know how to sew. This idea is even better if you have a fashion designer in your midst.  Instead of operating a thrift shop, why not go further and start a sewing school on site? The school will teach people in the community to design and recreate fashionable garments using the donated clothes as raw material. Those who can afford the tuition can pay; those who don’t can attend for free. The garments can be created for personal use.  They can also be sold, and the proceeds go towards operating the school. How about an annual fashion show? Who knows; this may begin a trend!   (This idea came about in a conversation with Lucky Altman Lynch, who has been creating new garments from resources in her closet of old clothes, and designer Stefan Daniel Bell of Metacouture during the Media and Faith workshop of the Kaleidoscope Summer Institute 2010 in Los Angeles.)

The purpose of this blog is to build a network and generate conversations. I invite readers to comment, network and share concrete ideas on sustainable communities in a networked world.  By the way, this blog got over 700 hits in its first week. Thank you for your support.  Now, I would invite more of you to comment and share your ideas.  In order to comment, you need to have an account with Typepad.  Here is how to do it.

1. Click FOLLOW (next to my picture) 

• This takes you to TypePad.com
• Once here this allows you to either sign-in or register.

2. If you do not have a TypePad account, click REGISTER, where you can sign up with your name and email address. 

• You can also sign up through Facebook which automatically links you. 
• You will now have your own TypePad profile, allowing you to "follow" other blogs. 

3. Last, go back to THE SUSTAINIST and click FOLLOW again.

• This allows the follower to follow all blogs and threaded conversations. 

 I look forward to hearing feedback from you.

 

Eric H. F. Law

Founder and Executive Director

Kaleidoscope Institute

For competent leadership in a diverse changing world

www.kscopeinstitute.org