Author Archive

By Tamara Connell

This day we finally made it to Melbourne, the last stop of our Hållbarhet2009 Learning Journey. We were greeted at CERES (the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies) by Philip Sutton of the Greenleap Strategic Institute. Philip is the co-author of a new book called Climate Code Red, where the climate crisis (and their view of the most appropriate response(s)) is discussed. For more information, you can read or listen to a recent interview with Philip here. For me, this was a poignant reminder that if we are serious about creating a sustainable society, we really need to start tackling the climate change issue as rapidly as possible - perhaps more rapidly that anything we can currently imagine. We shouldn’t lull ourselves to thinking that just because we understand sustainability and strategic planning, that we are simply doing our part. We need action, quite frankly, and on a massive scale. Again, I ask myself, is scaling up 10 times enough…

After lunch, we were provided a very informative site tour of the CERES garden/park/facilities. We learned much about the permaculture design, the composting toilets, the community food programmes, the alternative energy created on site, etc. It was inspiring to see what a dedicated group of volunteers can do, and it’s an amazing model for working with nature to satisfy many of our human needs. If only we could have one of these sites in every city, children would have the ability to learn and play within nature, and hopefully grow up with a better understanding of humans as one connected part of nature. The projects, research, education and training provided at CERES are extensive, and I highly recommend that you check out their website for more information.

With the usual 10 minutes to get ready, we dropped our bags at our last hostel and ‘freshened’ up. This evening we were to be hosted at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) by the kind folks at the Centre for Sustainability Leadership. They had invited an impressive array of like-minded networks to join us for an evening Dialogue Café. The Café was facilitated by the lively and humourous Jason Clarke. It was an interesting new take on the typical Dialogue/World Café that we are used to in MSLS - a bit like speed dating for networks interested to reach sustainability. We had a great time and met many new sustainability friends. There seems to be great momentum for sustainability action in Melbourne!

By Tamara Connell

[Apologies for a late posting on these last few days - I got a bit sick]

Day 9 started with our last breakfast in Thredbo. Leaving our little home away from home, we ventured south now… checking constantly on the latest fire reports. We drove through areas devastated by fire - just brick chimneys standing where there once was likely a house, a barn, a play yard for the children. We drove along, humbled by nature’s power.

Further down the road, we encountered entire ‘forests’ of standing black trees - created, we assumed, by the changing water tables and salinity of the Murray Darling River Basin. Stopping at Hume Dam, we heard about this river basin and the challenge of balancing pre-existing water rights during a time of long-standing drought.

Next we took a tour through the Barnawartha Biodiesel Plant, where they are converting tallow to market-quality biodiesel for use in Australia. They have a great process, using or selling almost every single by-product of their entire processes.

From Biodiesel to Wines - we spent some time getting an introduction to (and taste of!!) organic and biodynamic wines at Pennyweight Wines. What I found most interesting here is that somehow their products have been more or less left alone by ‘pests’ and birds. No netting is needed for their grapes - which sounded like a large savings in terms of both time and materials.

Finally this evening ended with an outdoor dinner, sauna and swim at the luxurious Lindenwarrah Estate, an elegant 5 star resort adjacent to a vineyard. After many nights of YHA bunkbeds (although for a youth hostel, YHA is quite good), having my own bed with crisp sheets was heavenly. Zzzzz.

Blog Post:  2/10/09

by Georges Dyer

Gloucester, Massachusetts is an American town with a lot of history, and it represents a lot of things - a fishing town, a hard-nosed New England culture, a tight-knit insular community, an inspiration to artists, a renowned bird-watching site, the oldest working waterfront in the country.  One thing it is not is a winter-time destination. 

But it was not the negative 5 degree (Fahrenheit) that turned the Northeastern US into a virtual gathering, though I’m sure it didn’t help.  It was simply a confluence of changed travel plans, family matters, and last-minute responsibilities that whittled the group planning on spending the weekend in Gloucester below critical mass. 

While we missed out on the personal contact, chilly walks on the beach, and fried clam feasts, the MSLS grads of the Northeast still managed to connect and set aside the time to take a step back, check-in with our regional network, learn from each other and recharge.  And, we happily avoided some growth in our carbon footprints. 

We started with quick updates on what everyone has been up to professionally - always an exciting undertaking with other Strategic Leaders:

Archie Kasnet (’05) debriefed on the progress with Aedi Group, the holding company with a portfolio of sustainability-oriented businesses in the technology and real estate spaces, and an associated non-profit, Village Corps, focused building a network of communities around the world creating and implementing sustainable development solutions.

Back in Baltimore, Geoff Stack (’08) has been pleased to see so much going on, and is taking full advantage by getting himself out there for as many speaking engagements as he can - an effective strategy for connecting and building his new practice - ThreeIn Consulting.

Michelle Dyer (’06) ran through her work as Vice President of Second Nature, a non-profit with the mission of making sustainability the foundation for all learning and practice in higher education.  Her initiative in building a rapidly growing team, building the Presidents’ Climate Commitment (over 600 college presidents committed to pursuing climate neutrality and sustainability education), and launching a new green building initiative for under-resourced institutions is having far-reaching impact.

Jennifer Woofter (’05) updated us on the continued success of her business, Strategic Sustainability Consulting, after four years.  Her work with small and medium sized businesses and non-profits has had a tremendous impact in engaging organizations on measuring their impacts and creating meaningful action plans.  The learning curve has been steep on being an entrepreneur and developing the difficult disciplines of meeting clients where they stand and building trust, and her insights were helpful to us all.  SSC continues to grow, having success with a network of associates that can build customized teams for specialized projects and client-needs.  And on top of all this, she was up most of the previous night looking after a new puppy.

Tim Nash (’08) gave an overview of his MSLS thesis work on Strategic Sustainable Investing - and a the resultant tool for evaluating how companies are using backcasting and approaching sustainability to better assess their true and long-term value.  Given the economic climate, Tim’s decided to be bold, and jump right in with a consulting practice to help green funds and investment shops educate their analysts, portfolio managers, investment advisers and clients on sustainability and what makes a “future-proof portfolio.”

Finally, I gave a quick update on my shifting role from working primarily with Michelle at Second Nature to focusing more and more on working with Archie at Aedi Group.

These updates transitioned nicely into our two discussion topics:

• 1) How have we been using the Framework for SSD, and what’s been working and what hasn’t, and
• 2) How can we scale up our impact towards sustainability 10-times?

 Of course we’re all using the framework, either explicitly or in-the-back-of-our-minds, in our work and personal lives.  Some key points emerged from the usual talk about what in the framework resonates with people and what doesn’t, different ideas about how to present the five levels and principles, etc…

We came to a real focus on the importance of stakeholder engagement - between sustainability practitioner and client (or partner, organization, community, etc.), and taking the time to really understand the motivations and values of the people we’re working with and build trust.  Stakeholder engagement is key between the group moving towards sustainability and its stakeholders, but also between the sustainability practitioner and the group he or she is trying to help move towards sustainability.

On a related note, we underscored the importance of the organizational learning concepts that can help people open up and understand the framework, and then start using it.  Concepts like dialogue and listening are often foreign to busy people in fast-moving businesses, especially it seems, here in the Northeast of the US.  

Improving the way we can facilitate these interactions and engagements of organizations and groups around sustainability is key to the art and practice of the sustainability practitioner, and central to scaling up our impact 10 times.

Other notable ways we felt we, as the MSLS alumni network, could scale up our impact turned out to be a couple of pretty straight-forward, tangible ideas:

 1) Visual aids - we noted how year over year the ways of representing the core concepts of SSD visually have continued to improve at a healthy clip. The Powerpoint slides, the thesis summaries and tools, promotional materials, videos, and the like - they keep getting better and better, and that’s a very good thing. The development of an effective online collaboration space will be huge helping us all to access and share all of these ever-improving resources, and help us work together on (a) creating more of them and (b) creating an effective platform - a one-stop-shop - that will enable the rest of the world to swing by, check them out, scale up their own positive impact.

2) People-focused - this was something that came up quite a bit in the ‘06 class, and it was reassuring in a way to hear that other classes had reached some similar conclusions - that in really driving the message home that social and ecological are two sides of the same coin, nested systems, the same “bus,” profoundly interrelated… however you want to say it - it is important to clearly communicate that sustainability is, as Geoff put it, “not just about birds and bunnies, it’s about us.” We revisited the approach of presenting the 4^th sustainability principle first and talked about Adam Werbach’s Birth of Blue speech which is a good way of helping people see this (though, personally, I think “green” is emerging as a short-hand for sustainability, including the crucial social element, but where that’s not clear, this kind of terminology could help). This point is particularly relevant in the US now, as so many more people are focused on the near-term issues around the economy and jobs, and it is critical that we as sustainability practitioners keep our message relevant and meet people where they are standing.

The conversation was fruitful and too short, and hopefully served as a warm-up to more in-person gatherings in the region in the near future.