Archive for February, 2009

By Tamara Connell

The Monday morning started with a sobering acknowledgement of the tragedies of the forest fires burning nearby - the death toll nearing 90 at that time. We shared our reflections on this, and other results of our global unsustainable activities. It was emotionally quite heavy and a strong reminder to many of us that we need to take action now, not rest on our laurels. ‘Scaling up’ - isn’t that what’s needed? Is 10 times enough?

We connected again with the Vancouver group to hear from them about some of their thoughts on these three questions.

We proceeded on our ‘Thredbo workshop’ to brainstorm actions that we felt we could take - anything, big or small, short term or long. We freed our minds and wrote furiously. Categorizing these, we set ourselves up for Action Plan topics in the following day.

We filled our bellies with more home-cooked food and joined a ‘Storytelling from the future’ exercise to share what it is like some time in the future.

By Tamara Connell

We rose early this morning to meet up online with other alumni groups in Karlskrona, London, Vancouver, and Boston. The current students have spent several months working together with an outside contact to create the structure for an online sharing platform, so they spent some time sharing this work with us, and fielding questions from the larger group. It promises to have an incredible amount of functionality for the MSLS alumni group, including project collaboration, connected blogs, resource libraries of all types, etc. etc.  This looks like a great step ahead for us, potentially allowing us to work better together to scale up our positive impact. If you’re an alumnus, watch for this in the coming months!

For me, this call was a real technological feat, connecting us around the world - on quick count I think we had at least 5 locations and roughly 100 people on the same call. Amazing! (We later connected again with Ottawa, and had further online discussions with Boston and London.)

Follow the early regional check-in, we connected live with Dr. Bob Willard from his home in Ontario, Canada. Bob shared with us some the main ideas of his current work in progress - the third of his books, intended to be a ’sustainability champion’s guidebook’ for helping to transform your company - and we followed with a great discussion of related topics.

We then heard presentations on BTH (Göran Broman), MSLS (me), and The Natural Step (Richard Blume). Some great information was shared on the past, present and future of these 3 groups.

Overall, it was a day filled with many familiar faces from other parts of the world, and it inspired us to get to work answering some of the questions at hand:

How can we scale up the impact of SSD (Strategic Sustainable Development) 10 times?

• Who are ‘we’, and what is our work?
• What is the impact we want to scale up? Why? Where are we now?
• What do we do together which we could not do alone? How can we support each other, and what is our unique contribution? With whom can we collaborate?

We capped the afternoon off with a swim in a nearby creek. We were all alerted by the obvious smoke rolling into the valley from the reported forest fires.

For dinner, we were joined by Acacia Rose and her partner Peter, both local activists of the area. Acacia told us of her stories of fighting for the Snowy River to be maintained within public control. She shared the sobering reality that the water flows at a mere 4% today. She’s had some wins - one quite recently - but it appears that we need to really step up the charge to maintain the ‘commons’ in the hands of the communities, and to be more transparent in our governance and decision making.

While some went to bed, others stayed up to watch the Man from Snowy River, having just heard so much about the plight of this water supply.

Canberra to Thredbo - Day 5.

By Richard Blume and Tracy Lydiatt

Its been a day of tears, deep emotional connection and growing recognition of the severity of the sustainability crisis in Australia.

After farewelling Ella Lawton and David Cook, spontaneity led us to visit the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (our original plan to hike up Mt. Kosciuszko didn’t seem such a great idea with extreme temperatures predicted). This tent site, consisting of a campsite in front of the nation’s parliamentary precinct in Canberra, is a perpetual protest to recognize Aboriginal rights and indigenous custodianship of the Australian continent.

We were invited to a welcome ceremony where we connected with fire, water, air and land. The smell of eucalyptus infused the air as we circled a campfire and breathed in smoke said to have a healing effect when it enters the bloodstream. The men and women were split into groups, the men on the inside of the circle walking in the direction of the sun and the women formed an outer ring, encompassing the men (as all men were created from woman) and walked in the direction of the moon. While circling the fire in barefoot to connect with the earth, we were gently sung to by one of the Aboriginal men in both english and his native language. Some of us were moved to tears and felt a deep connection to the land and our spirits. A calmness covered our group once we were finished the circle.

We heard stories - alarmingly recent (1960s and 70s) – of when Aborigines were considered part of the local flora and fauna, when they were excluded from the national census, when they were refused the right to vote and when their children were forcibly removed from their families. And we heard of the ongoing struggle for land rights, reconciliation and economic and social wellbeing that continues to this day.

Auntie Judie Kelly made us feel welcome and explained how the smoking ceremony was an invitation to leave footprints on the Australian soil, and would serve as protection for our visit. She also explained that she was separated at birth from her parents as part of the Stolen Generation, the effects of which span at least three generations.

Auntie Isabelle Coe, an internationally renowned pioneer of indigenous rights recounted the history of the Tent Embassy and her epic struggle as a resident at the site since its establishment 37 years ago. Her story is profound.

The significance of last year’s national apology from the Federal Government was very clear. Limited action since then is a disappointment, particularly as other sustainability issues such as climate change, water rights and the economic downturn have taken the focus elsewhere.

A systems perspective might help. In fact, there is no more poignant a demonstration of the interconectedness of social, ecological and economic sustainability issues than the plight of Indigenous Australians. For a start, learning to live within ecological limits is something these people have mastered over 40-60,000 years (to put this in context, European civilisation has sprung up since the last ice-age 10,000 years ago). We have a lot to learn.

The Natural Step system conditions help to further demonstrate the link between sustainable development and indigenous culture. As Australia has sought to meet its needs as a nation, indigenous cultures have suffered deeply: every one of their basic human needs (Identity, Subsistance, Protection, Freedom, Participation, Understanding, Affection, Creativity and Idleness) have been affected by unsustainable development. Read more.

As a first step to show our support, we were invited to send postcards to them at the Tent Embassy. It might help to know we’ve personally seen their mailbox – a 44 galon drum painted with the Aboriginal Flag and rocks used to hold down their mail. We want to make sure they have to find some bigger rocks in order to hold down all the mail they will get from us!

As we now enter the retreat phase of our journey, this visit was a sobering experience that left many of us reeling. Nearing Thredbo, we stopped to hear a short presentation from the local waterkeepers on the state of the Snowy River (now flowing at just 4% of natural flows). Just another sobering experience to add to the day.

Now the retreat begins. Its time to get serious and use these experiences to help us develop our visions for scaling up!