Envisioning,Enacting,and Enjoying Sustainability

Amy Townsend

When I envision sustainability, I imagine a world that is rich with ideas, possibilities, and continuously improved health for humans and nonhumans alike. It is a deeply compelling vision that extends beyond today’s sustainability focus on doing less harm through resource conservation and pollution reduction. While doing less harm is important, the idea, for me, fails to stir the senses. Being less bad does not entice.

My vision for sustainability entails something altogether different. It is a grand choreography between humans and the places in which we are embedded. This dance is mutually beneficial, helping to enhance ecosystem health, complexity, and resilience thereby resulting in an exciting and unlimited array of evolutionary possibilities for places and their people.

We live in a world of degraded ecosystems that have been dismantled for development or extraction. The more “stripped down” an ecosystem is, the lower its resilience to internal and external perturbations and the fewer its evolutionary opportunities. By harming or removing certain threads entirely (e.g., through the extirpation or extinction of species), we reduce a system’s overall resilience and, as a result, our own. We also decrease the number of evolutionary opportunities available to all species, including our own.

Conversely, ecosystems that are healthy, vibrant, and diverse have a greater likelihood of handling perturbations and, due to their diversity, have a greater set of possible evolutionary outcomes available.

We live in an exhilarating time that enables us to perceive and respect ecosystems as incredibly complex sets of adaptive relationships that have been woven together through their interactions over time and space by all species and the places that they inhabit, use, or otherwise affect. In order to be truly sustainable, I envision healing a wounded planet to restore its inherent health, resilience, and evolutionary possibilities and, as a result, our own.

I entered the sustainability realm around 1992. Noting the dearth of research on how to green businesses and other organizations, I spent several years researching and writing what I believe was the first book on greening the workplace. It was titled The Smart Office (1997) because, at the time, “green” was a word that was not taken very seriously by most businesses, and “sustainable” was not well known.

Since then, there has been an incredible amount of work done to mature the concept and practices associated with sustainability. There is an almost overwhelming number of conceptual models and tools for sustainability, some of which are more effective than others.

Less effective but common approaches to sustainability rely on generic improvements that do not account for the specificities and complexities of place or context. To overcome this, I see potential for synchronicity among context-driven approaches emerging from different fields. These approaches include Robert Pojasek’s context-driven organizational sustainability model, the Regenesis Group’s regenerative development approach, and my business ecology model.

All three models emphasize becoming and remaining intimately familiar with place as it changes through time. Pojasek’s work (2016) relies on the premise that all organizations operate in an uncertain world and that by continuously scanning their internal and external contexts they can identify and properly manage opportunities and threats through meaningful stakeholder involvement. He suggests integrating sustainability throughout every aspect of an organization through the organization’s risk management plan and activities. His organizational sustainability model neatly aligns with several familiar models, including conventional management systems (ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and OHSAS 18001), risk management (ISO 31000), social responsibility (ISO 26000 and AS 8303), sustainability (BS 8900), business excellence frameworks (e.g., Baldrige Performance Excellence), and process improvement approaches (Lean and Six Sigma).

The Regenesis Group follows the premise that all ecosystems can be enhanced to support their health and ongoing evolution and that this is the appropriate role of humans on a living planet (B. Haggard, 2016, personal correspondence). This is done using a whole living systems approach that focuses on identifying the unique qualities of a place and its role within larger contexts (Mang & Reed, 2012). Regenesis studies how culture, ecology, economy, geography, and climate have worked together over time to bring a place to its current state. Then, it works with local stakeholders to determine how best to build or enhance the evolutionary capacity of their place, including its human and nonhuman community for maximum benefit to both.

Finally, my business ecology model (Townsend, 2009; Townsend & Heine, 2012) suggests that companies wishing to be sustainable need to continuously integrate sustainability throughout the entire organization—mission, staff, operations, facilities and sites, and products and services. Based on 12 guiding principles, it contends that companies need to remain informed by and to develop mutually beneficial relationships with their primary, secondary, and tertiary sites—the places that they inhabit through their facilities, use for their resources, and otherwise affect through their activities, respectively.

All three of these models strongly suggest that understanding context (e.g., ecological, social, economic, political, legal) is fundamental to creating mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their places. In fact, context should be examined in detail and used to inform and drive the company’s mission, strategic objectives, and ultimate ability to succeed.

Of course, sustainability extends beyond business. It relates to how we live and work. Though I have attempted to be more sustainable in both roles, some efforts have been more successful than others. I have spent the past 25 years writing, teaching, and consulting on business sustainability, biodiesel and advanced biofuels, green building, India’s Sundarbans ecosystem, and other topics. Thirty years ago, I began to follow a vegan diet. I also chose not to have children. For more than 20 years, I have largely telecommuted. In late 2007, I started the first nationwide vegan meal delivery service—only to shutter it less than a year later as the country suffered through the recession. Currently, I am in the process of replacing my monocrop lawn with more diverse gardens, which comprise a mix of vegetables and flowering plants. I have a small organic orchard and keep honeybees—not so much for the honey as to support the honeybee population. I am attempting not only to produce some of my own food but to “grow soil”, as my grandfather put it. From all of this, I have learned that there are many expressions of sustainability and that it is really about our very personal relationships with the land, water, and air. How do we perceive and interact with them? In our lives and our work, are we a part of them or apart from them?

I am hopeful and enthusiastic regarding the potential for sustainability moving forward. My hope for the future, both in the near term and long term, has deepened as my own understanding of sustainability has matured. Since my early involvement in the first nationwide sustainability policy framework (World Wildlife Fund & National Commission on the Environment, 1993), I have seen the field of sustainability advance considerably. There are an increasing number of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary models and tools that can be used to advance sustainability and regenerate communities and ecosystems. I have no doubt that those who focus on learning from and co-evolving with the specificities of place can carry us far.

Ralph Meima

I was delighted and apprehensive when Mark invited me to contribute to a guest editorial. Delighted because I have great respect for Mark. Apprehensive because prospects for progress in sustainability remain politically fraught and hostage to corporatist agendas. Sharing my sustainability perspective therefore involves mixed feelings.

I believe we come to sustainability from the place where we first sense its system-ness—the interconnectedness of everything natural and human. In my case, as a relatively affluent 1970s suburban child, it was through an affinity with nature. I was into hiking, camping, the outdoors. My first awareness of the sustainability puzzle involved wildlife conservation and wilderness protection, and the offenses of pollution and litter.

From engineering school into my twenties, I was drawn to visions of wind turbines, solar arrays, geodesic domes, and urban farms. It was not until later that I discovered connections from my starting point to environmental justice, social justice, global north–south issues, and economic justice—and understood the incompleteness and bias of my early sustainability “gestalt.” But there are many starting points for eventually comprehending the whole of sustainability. I think that the priority now must be to quickly and effectively transport people’s understanding from their respective starting points to this whole; to discourage reductionism and blinding bias; and to nurture a holistic vision of sustainability in which we are all present and all of our experiences valid.

Early on, I intuited that the real sustainability challenges were in our heads, even though the problems were manifest in our artifacts and relationships. Without mental change, new practices and institutions would not emerge. As an activist after college and during my master’s education, and then as a PhD candidate, I worked on diagrams, matrices, typologies, and other attempts to make the subjective world of thought concrete, and easier to manipulate. In the world of theory, fundamental weaknesses were that nature was not “in” human society; sustainability was not “in” human logic; and environmental and social performance were not “in” measures of and incentives for business performance. Getting them “in” seemed urgent. Institutional “things” like regulations, voluntary industry standards, codes of conduct, management systems, and multiple bottom lines offered domains for such action.

So I put a lot of time and effort into such projects, and I was not alone. For me, the culmination was actually creating, launching, and running for nearly 6 years an MBA program in “Managing for Sustainability,” where the latest sustainability/accountability/CSR (corporate social responsibility)/ESG (environmental, social, and governance), and other toolsets were front and center. Cultivating managers and entrepreneurs who could do business sustainably by using these tools seemed to me a fruitful way to enact sustainability.

My explorations of sustainability through management academia left me with a troubling impression. Despite successful attempts at “socially responsible business,” “conscious capitalism,” and so forth—mostly small, entrepreneurial, consumer businesses—their flourishing since the mid-1980s has coincided with the contraction of the middle class in industrialized countries, notably in the United States. And, it appears likely that the socially responsible business movement, for all its media exposure and inflated expectations, was at worst a smoke screen for accelerating economic injustice, and at best incidental. While there have been measurable technical improvements in recent decades, for example, in energy efficiency, renewable energy, toxics reduction, organic food production, and electric vehicles, these are consistent with the steady rise of productivity and do not necessarily address issues of justice or whole-system health.

Enveloping this impression is the fact that the very rich and their corporations, media, foundations, think tanks, and politicians have been able to expropriate much of the increase in productivity and economic value. As a result, they play a dominant role in setting the political and social agenda. Their distortion or skew—denying climate change, for example, or defending the expanded use of GMOs (genetically modified organisms)—is at odds with the scientific and moral consensus. They defend unsustainable practices and technologies, such as the fossil fuel industry, ocean fishing, and tropical forest destruction, and fight rear-guard battles to sustain profits from soon-to-be-stranded assets for as long as they still can. The worsening economic inequality, poverty, and reduced governmental functions moreover deprive a significant portion of the electorate of the education, health care, life quality, and hope and optimism needed for democracy to adopt and pursue sustainability goals. This situation is part and parcel of the rising political crisis, spanning U.S. Tea Party activism against the TARP (or Troubled Asset Relief Program) in 2008 to Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the party insurgencies of Trump and Sanders during the 2015-2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, and even the June 23 “Brexit.”

Seen through my personal and professional lenses, therefore, the pursuit of sustainability over the past several decades has suffered the paradoxical interplay of unrealized hopes in socially responsible business, steady technical progress, an increasingly powerful oligarchy that interferes with society’s ability to enact sustainability, and a resistance movement. This conundrum is, I argue, more important than any other economic factor, management fashion, or societal trend in understanding the sclerotic enactment of sustainability.

It is fascinating to contemplate how many taken-for-granted aspects of our daily lives include things that only arrived recently, and how many expectations (particularly of the idealistic or grandiose variety, like world government or moon colonies) have not panned out. Our world has become much more interconnected than I expected. It is also much more open. If you were born before, say, 1970, you might recall how normal and “forever” the Iron Curtain felt. Those born before around 1990 might recall a time when it was so hegemonically normal for parent-pairs to be heterosexual that few could conceive of any alternative. And then there’s the Internet: so rich, so all-encompassing, and yet barely a generation old.

So, with reality continually unfolding from one surprise to the next, perhaps we will find a sustainable path that comprises solutions to economic injustice, enfeebled democracy, and other social dysfunctions. But what if our accomplishment is less than ideal? This has to be considered. What if the damage to our climate causes repercussions so extreme that its impact on humanity rivals the last Ice Age or the arrival of agriculture? At stake may be the stable climates necessary for food production. The variability in heat, rainfall, and wind could become too great for crop farming. Crop agriculture would have to move indoors: greenhouses, hydroponics, aquaponics, synthetic foods. Technology would become very advanced. Humanity’s survival would depend on maintaining these technical systems. Food production on Earth might be nearly as technology-intensive as food production on Mars. Who would have access?

This may not be a vision of sustainability that sits well with us today, yet with what we are doing to the climate system, getting enough to eat might trump all else, and where is the urgent, transformative action needed to prevent this scenario? Will the “corporate coup d’état,” to quote John Ralston Saul (1997), put defensive, reactionary power at the helm for too long? Is incremental, piecemeal, and yet ultimately sustainable reform through liberal institutions no longer viable in a corporatist, oligarchic society?

Mark Starik

My current perception of sustainability is a collection of ever-awakening dreams that are continuously unfolding, a kind of multilevel/multisystems kaleidoscope of things and people I recognize and things and people I don’t recognize. It is an imperfect mix of utopias and dystopias, of entities, like health, well-being, and happiness clashing and coexisting with disease, dissatisfaction, and death. It seems what we in these dreams are trying to do is to hold onto what we value and to change our situations and surroundings for the better, if very slowly, or at least trying to not make them worse—both letting evolution happen and the multiverse unfold and, to whatever extent possible, helping shape them in more beneficial directions and patterns (and/or preventing them from sliding toward catastrophe). Environment, society, economy, and mind/spirit, sometimes separate and, at other times, comingle. Time is somehow involved, not just unidirectionally, but rather more like a fluctuating and pulsing set of ocean waves and swells. Their drumbeat can be heard that humans need to reduce present and future suffering, but we are not sure when the drumming will stop, so we feel the need to do something soon, even to quicken the pace. We see that we humans are too many in number and impact and that we often mistreat one another, the millions of other species, and the Earth, in general; what to do as we slip, slide, “satisfice,” and/or slog our way toward enacting a better existence?

I sense that one key is for as many of us as possible to be awake/aware/sensitive, to pay attention as much and as often as possible, to get/give advice/assistance, take action, learn from results, and never give up or stop asking others to join the sustainability cause. It seems long past time for us to do far more than just talk about these issues, to start setting and achieving never-ending-improvement goals, to regularly assess our progress, and to keep improving all that we can. For those of us who have been on the planet for a few decades, it appears to be time to take a lifelong/lifetime perspective on sustainability, and, for most of us, to make amends, reverse course, and lead in the right direction(s).

My own past personal actions have included not having children, going car-free, and not eating animals, but other less-sustainable personal and professional actions have definitely involved overconsuming, most obviously via the scores of airline flights I have taken for both recreation and work. Like many of you, I have limited my living space and am trying to sustainably manage energy, water, and waste whenever possible, and have participated in numerous community and university greening activities. But only recently have I started measuring and tracking my sustainability (and unsustainability) behaviors as part of a personal sustainability plan. I am glad to have experienced a sustainability academic career, which has included decades of sustainability teaching and researching, as well as working with many of you to help launch and advance the field of sustainability management. We helped form the Academy of Management Organizations and Natural Environment Interest Group (now Division), and many of you have made contributions to this journal over the years, including during the two multiyear terms for which I served as a co-editor. But, looking back, it would definitely have been preferable if the ratio between my doing sustainability, on one hand, and talking/writing about it on the other, was greater than it has turned out to be. To this day, my most favorite job in my career was serving as a Community Action Agency/DOE Weatherization program director, helping low-income and elderly rural residents in the upper U.S. Midwest save energy and money. That last aspect reminds me that being charitable in several ways was also a sustainability action that I could have adopted more frequently and substantively.

My psychic–emotional need appears to include being part of a movement that helps hold off the disaster of unsustainability, that practices all-around enoughness, eases imbalances and crises, and increases consistency between what is said and what is done. My hope is not for us to seek or experience perfection in one or more sustainable cultures, but rather simply to develop and enjoy a general ongoing OK-ness which we can adapt as the concept and practice of sustainability evolves in the future. A few years ago, one of my coauthors, Patricia Kanashiro, and I (Starik & Kanashiro, 2013) suggested in this journal that what our species needed in order to move our cultures further and faster toward sustainability was an immersion in the evolving concept and practice of sustainability. Such a cultural sustainability immersion would mean that almost (but not absolutely) everything we humans felt, thought, did, and communicated would be associated with our own individual and collective perceptions of sustainability, both environmental and socioeconomic, and, when possible, the integration of those two aspects of sustainability. That belief continues, so that the more we can perceive we are headed together down the sustainability path, the more joy I hope we all experience in being part of that sustainability-evolution. And, the greater the proportion of us who join, energize, and improve that movement, the more that enjoyment broadens and deepens.

One Emerging Reality?

What can be learned from these three perspectives on “sustainability envisioning, enacting, and enjoying”? First, of course, is that we have related some commonalities, such as the yearning for a better world and the taking of some actions which, in some small way, might help us achieve it, and we have expressed some differences, whether political, professional, or personal. Second, we have demonstrated an interest in communicating and exchanging those sustainability similarities and differences, since that, too, might be part of the action in which we can all engage, again for the purpose of advancing us collectively on the path of sustainability. Finally, though, the main potential lesson may be the realization that our sustainability realities appear to both converge with and diverge from one another, which may be cause for us all to continue to develop and share our sustainability visions, actions, and feelings.

Article Highlights of This Issue

We are very pleased that we are able to feature five interesting articles in this issue, each focusing on its own set of sustainability management visions, actions, and emotions (at least in the form of values). This current issue’s authors may be one of the most internationally diversified sets we have published recently, as every author set (and their institutions) hail from a different country! Hence, readers interested in a more global (or at least multicountry) focus on sustainability management may be especially attracted to this issue and able to build their respective global networks by communicating with one or more of our author sets after reading their respective contributions.

First, in “Business Models for Sustainability: A Co-evolutionary Analysis of Sustainable Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Transformation,” Stefan Schaltegger, Florian Lüdeke-Freund, and Erik Hansen follow-up on their successful editorial collaboration on sustainability management business models in the O&E special issue of March, 2016, by using evolutionary economics, in particular the concepts of coevolution and innovation, to construct a theoretical framework highlighting business model development approaches for both large established and smaller new firms engaged in transforming their respective business ecosystems toward greater sustainability.

A second conceptual article, “How Firm Responses to Natural Disasters Strengthen Community Resilience: A Stakeholder Based Perspective,” by Brent McKnight and Martina Linnenluecke, employs stakeholder theory to suggest and develop different postures, relationships, and outcomes between those approaches that are more firm-centric and those which are more community-centric.

Beginning a set of three empirical articles, Armell Mazé, Myriam Aït-Aïssa, Sophie Mayer, and Nathalie Verjux, in “Third-Party Certifications and the Role of Auditing Policies in Sustainability: The Time and Space of Materiality Within Combined Audits,” analyze various aspects of agricultural sustainability-related certification processes, focusing on timing, form, and knowledge aspects of multiple third-party certification audits and their benefits to and limits on farmers seeking to advance sustainability in their agricultural operations.

Those of us who are career-long (sustainable) strategy instructors will likely be very interested in Nick Barter’s article, titled “Strategy Textbooks and the Environment Construct: Are the Texts Enabling Strategists to Realize Sustainable Outcomes?” in which he analyzes some of the most popular strategy textbooks and discusses findings that may or may not surprise those readers/instructors.

Finally, Asadul Hoque, Amelia Clarke, and Lei Huang return us to discussions of stakeholders, in “Lack of Stakeholder Influence on Pollution Prevention: A Developing Country Perspective,” in which they analyze various aspects of 11 Bangladeshi stakeholder groups with environmental interests and find differences among them in environmental awareness, willingness to influence pollution prevention policy, and actual attempts to influence that set of policy issues.

We thank these authors and their reviewers for their collegial efforts to advance sustainability scholarship and we especially thank Amy Townsend and Ralph Meima for contributing so thoughtfully to this issue’s Collaborative Guest Editorial!