Gestalt Internet search, connecting the silos

The Internet contains an increasingly vast amount of information from many sources created from many different perspectives. The freedom with which anyone can add content to the Internet gives rise to incredible richness covering many aspects of every topic. This same freedom, necessarily largely disorganized, also makes accessing the information and understanding which sources are objective or related and providing different views extremely difficult. There are many silos of information content generation, management, and aggregation.

Silobreaker is a combination of search and aggregation that attempts to make sense of the cacophony of discourse by automatically trawling the Internet and combining related information into a newspaper style that provides a single place where different aspects of news such as people, comment, geography, are collected together to provide a more rounded view of each topic.

The site is created automatically by robots that continuously search the web looking for related content and combining them into articles that can be searched. As well as using traditional search techniques it uses emerging semantic web technology to attempt to identify content that is related even though it was originally created in separate silos. The aim, to provide a way of accessing the increasingly complex heaps of independent blog posts, news articles, research papers...

The site also provides a semantic search that will find topics related to the one you are interested in. This example shows topics automatically discovered as related to Sustainability:

This is one of a number of attempts at making the process of sharing knowledge in a way it can be easily accessed more sustainable, reducing the risk of an increasingly disconnected set of different perspectives on the same topic and building a more complete picture of what we know, think, or claim.

Urgent Evoke - Sustaining ideation events

Some problems seem so intractable they just won't lie down.
How do you keep the ideas coming when each idea for improving the situation seems to produce more problems?

The World Bank Institute in conjunction with infoDev, and the Korean Trust Fund on ICT created a social networking game - Urgent Evoke to allow thousands of people to collaborate not just on developing ideas, but expanding on the problem via blogging of text, images, and video around core themes or "evokations" that you can then invite others to participate in. Turning problem solving into a game where everyone can take part and evoke responses from others by sharing their problems... and their ideas about potential solutions... makes problem solving both interactive and much more engaging. This infoDev article summarises some of their successes.


The Evoke leader board on global giving for the last evoke event shows the kinds of challenges people are struggling against and additionally provides a means for people to donate to support the individual initiatives emerging to combat those challenges.


For example, Organism is planned as a non-profit website fostering collaboration, where internet users can develop concepts into working projects for the greater good. Their perspective:


"The world is rife with challenges exceeding the capacity of any single person to solve. With 1.6 billion internet users world wide, digital collaborative networks have been seen as a potent solution for the last decade. Networks have been started, yet not one has attained widespread popularity. We have identified four components essential to a collaborative network's success, and determined that the absence of two or more elements has been the cause of every failed attempt."


Their aim is to "solve the worlds problems by catalyzing collaboration among the 1.6 billion internet users"... something to keep an eye on.

Is money sustainable as the primary means of measuring wealth?

The answer to this question will seem obvious and yet we disagree.

In this recent article from the Guardian posted by Felicity Lawrence entitled 'Big Business Clear Winner in Asparagus Industry', the implication being that if there is a clear winner then there must also be a clear loser, in this case the local people of Peru's Ica Valley, the promise of wealth in the form of money has resulted in depletion of the natural water resources to the extent that any wealth that did exist in terms of land on which you could live has rapidly been eroded.

Everything is connected, as we know. Pull one string and all sorts of things move that you hadn't anticipated... well, in some cases perhaps people have anticipated but their desire, focus, priority is elsewhere.

The Peruvian Asparagus industry, created to serve those wealthy countries who like to eat asparagus out of season, with the help of loans from the world bank, have managed to participate in an 'asparagus economy' in which $0.70 of each $1 spent on Asparagus ends up in US supermarket pockets, whilst much of the remaining $0.30 goes to buy seed and fertiliser from the US, the local profit still being higher than without an industry in cash terms.... but now look at the relative wealth in terms of the sustainability of the environment. Water was diverted from the Ica river to sustain the Asparagus farms. The water is being consumed at a drastically higher rate than previously, upsetting the balance of the ecosystem and causing other indigenous farms, crops, herds, to fail.

The two forms of wealth are directly coupled. The GDP of Peru has gone up due to the amount of money changing hands in the Asparagus economy and the amount of water available for sustaining other agriculture and other life has gone down to the extent that many have been driven from the area.

There can be no one measure of wealth. Any such measure, to be a successful measure would have to balance many factors. The way in which these factors would have to be balanced would vary depending by region - some areas are wealthy in water, others in minerals, and so on - hence the local value of those things, the actual value - not the market value, is different. Clearly water is more valuable than gold in some places as you simply die if you don't get enough of it and it really is that scarce. So there can be no single measure of wealth as to increase that - to increase GDP is to deplete some other resources, which are consumed in the conversion of various other kinds of wealth into GDP. The formula for determining the impact on local communities - on humanity in that region is different per region.

There are no two ways about it; we need to remain vigilant, and aware of the consequences of our actions; we have to keep our eye on the accelerator, and the clutch, and the break, and check what we are towing doesn't topple over as we go around the bend... we can't just look at weather we are going faster than anyone else. Its senseless.


There is a natural laziness in us that leads to band wagon behaviour, and grasping at simplicity - like using GDP or cash as a means of testing "whether you are going to be okay".... when actually what we need to consider is different for all of us for many reasons, and especially in areas where the environment is harsh.

We need to keep our eye on many more factors and recognise wealth in different forms if we are to avoid destroying true wealth in terms of local resources that contribute to a sustainable ecosystem in favour of virtual, made up, forms of wealth like money.

It seems to me that greater consideration needs to be given by organisations like the world bank to consider not just the money economy, or the related asparagus economy, but also the water economy, the energy economy, the carbon economy, ... the sustainability economy.

One Laptop Per Child

Situation

Western kids sit on sofas watching cartoons about destruction on 42" televisions. Education is often taken for granted and their expectation is that society will look after them. It does this by building tanks and GPS guided missiles, spending most of its money on defence. In poorer parts of the world children are hungry or suffering from diseases that could easily have been prevented for the want of a little education. Many don't even have electricity or the ability to share ideas and successes about how to create a better world.

Problem

How sustainable is a human race that rushes ahead in one part of the world developing high tech and luxury living with hollywood movies exaggerating and provoking people to ever greater excesses and the primary feeling towards other parts of the world being one of fear when other parts of the world struggle with basics like sanitation and agriculture, let alone even having basic infrastructure like electricity or computers to enable sharing of ideas and collaboration in education for solving community problems?

Implication

Whilst the potential for greatness and achievement are squandered by those that are privileged, fear ironically seeming to be proportional to wealth, and depression taking over where a lackadaisical attitude reveals no challenges in life, others are deprived of even the basics of education and whilst seeming incredibly happy and hopeful in many cases by comparison, they are severely disadvantaged and removed from being able to contribute to that greater achievement we could all be sharing in. The ability to contribute to a sustainable global human social dynamic is being denied almost every young person despite the well accepted fact that it is the children, the next generation of thinkers, that will be the ones that will create change. Ability to create positive change is massively impacted by conditioning and awareness of the broader situation and its implications. A globally shared awareness is key to creating a sustainable humanity.

Need

Fundamental educational needs are failing to be met. In the richer parts of the world a woeful lack of awareness and laziness created by a bratitude born of ignorance stifles imagination and creativity whilst in poorer locations basic education relating to health and agriculture must be improved. Whilst the specific areas of education differ (from awareness of the wider world and how different your position is to others, to basic knowledge about disease and agriculture), there is a common need for inspiration and excitement in education. Only when children are able to see the nature of the world in which they live and understand the potential roles they could play in that can they really experience life "in the real world" and come to conclusions about who they want to become and how they will make their life worthwhile. Anyone put in such a position would feel gratitude and want to share the same privileges with others.

Solution

There are many ongoing activities in the world chipping away at different parts of this challenge. The one we are going to talk about here is a charity called One Laptop Per Child. Their aim is to put a laptop in the hands of all children all over the world. They have over 1.5 million laptops already deployed to various countries including Peru, Uganda, Uruguay, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and many others.

The XO laptops suitable for use anywhere, where there may be little or no electricity and where the environment may be too harsh for a normal laptop to operate reliably have been created to run from solar power

They have a wiki for collaboration in deploying these laptops and providing electricity and internet connectivity; a significant challenge in such wildly differing environments. Here is a world map of deployments. Its an impressive achievement. There are also projects running in the UK and North America.

An open software environment that can be developed by the open source community as well as by the teachers and kids themselves has been created in the guise of Sugar running on fedora linux. Sugar comes with many pre-installed educational applications called activities. Its provided by Sugar Labs and has its own development wiki where people can contribute activities to the growing list. This list currently include a physics simulation programs (that really is child's play), turtle graphics, puzzles, ebook readers, various kinds of programming activities that have been made very simple, colourful and appealing even to the extent that software programs look like jigsaw puzzles that you fit together to get the turtle to move around the screen drawing geometric shapes. Many more sugar activities are available for download. Sugar comes pre-installed on the XO and is also freely available for anyone to run on their PC or Mac. Various formats are available with Sugar on a Stick being the most portable - boot your computer from the memory stick. Its also possible to run Sugar on virtual machines like VMWare, VirtualBox and Parallels Desktop for Windows or Mac.

Core to this endeavour are a constructionist approach that leads to a focus on providing opportunity for self learning fueled by curiosity rather than setting an agenda for what should be learnt alongside providing the capabilities for collaboration. The XO laptops all have long range wifi for connecting to the internet but even if no internet infrastructure or wifi router are available, the XO laptops still automatically discover other XO laptops that are nearby and form a mesh so they can all communicate. This mesh can span up to 12 miles, with laptops between distant children acting as go-betweens. One of the core applications on the XO lets you see who is in your neighbourhood. You can talk with them by typing or using audio, every XO has a webcam too. You can also share any application so you can collaborate on drawing a picture or solving a problem or even reading a book.



You may think food is more important than laptops. The point is that the right kind of technology can massively amplify the effectiveness of not just education but also of social development. Knowledge about how to fish is more valuable than fish and an environment where you can create knowledge for yourself fuelled by your own curiosity and unfettered access to world knowledge is even more valuable. There are plenty of YouTube videos about this. These two sum up the mission nicely:
OLPC Mission Part 1
OLPC Mission Part 2

What do you think will be the consequences of connecting all children of the world together in a collaborative mesh of laptops over the internet? What do you think tomorrow could look like? For the most part kids ask pretty basic, and wise questions - and try and find answers to the questions the adults gave up on long ago. They typically don't pussy foot around either... sounds like the kind of change we need on this planet.

Carbon Quilt

Carbon Quilt is a prototype visualisation tool designed by Carbon Visuals Ltd to raise awareness of the impact of carbon emissions by showing the size of a carbon footprint that otherwise would be invisible. In an attempt to overcome the "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome and raise awareness of the 80 million tonnes of CO2 put into the atmosphere every year, they came up with the concept of the Carbon Quilt to show the depth of emissions that would cover the earth if all the CO2 settled at ground level. This can then be divided up into "patches" to show how much different countries or activities contribute.


As well as the "visualiser" tool that you can use to explore the carbon impact around the world, Carbon Visuals provide a number of services and have a number of other visualisations and interactive tools showing the carbon footprint of various installations or activities.

This depiction of the CO2 emitted by Stoke Newington School every year is the result of a project where pupils explored compelling ways of depicting the carbon footprint of the school. This image shows the depth of CO2 generated in a year if it were all placed in an area the size of a nearby park that everyone knows.

See their flickr photo stream for more.

This visualisation shows the annual carbon quilt produced by the UK in one year; an area significantly bigger than the UK itself. As Carbon Visuals explain "The carbon quilt is the layer of carbon dioxide made up of the whole world's emissions. In 2006, we emitted enough carbon dioxide to form a layer 31 mm deep, so the depth of the quilt over a timescale of a year is 31 mm. The emissions for a day make a layer one 365th as deep. Patches reveal particular contributions to the whole world's emissions. Their areas vary, but their depth is always the same as the whole layer - the quilt depth."


Visit the carbon quilt gallery on their website for more visualisation examples in both image and video form.


This video on YouTube is particularly striking and shows a real time animation of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2006 (957 tonnes per second) in terms of filling the space occupied by the UN Building in New York every half a second.

If you are interested in Carbon Quilt and have ideas of your own, why not visit their feedback forum, see what others are thinking and share your thoughts?

Visualising World Statistics

A new way to look at the world is provided by Mapping Worlds. Select the statistic you are interested in and it resizes the countries to be in proportion. For a dynamic map of the States of the USA take a look here: show.mappingworlds.com/usa/
Use the animated map below to visualise the worlds resources and other statistics from coal or oil reserves to population to CO2 emissions to GDP.

You need flash installed to get the above map to work. If you haven't got flash you can see the statistics for CO2 emissions below:

Trading Carbon Offsets for a Brighter Planet

Once governments realised the need to reduce carbon emissions they then had to face the fact that in many industries, organisations would simply be unable to reduce their emissions sufficiently without suffering a massive impact on their efficiency or profitability. The consequent impact on the economy would be unacceptable. A means was needed to create a transition from the current state of industry where carbon emissions were unregulated and unacceptably high to a future state where carbon emissions are controlled and within acceptable limits.

Various concepts and workarounds have come about because of the inability of industry to quickly reduce its carbon footprint to within acceptable limits. Recognising the potential impact on the economy of forcing businesses to conform to carbon footprint regulation, a trading vehicle was established in the form of carbon offsets to enable organisations to increase the amount of carbon dioxide or equivalent they are permitted to emit. Organisations that cannot meet the levels of carbon emissions deemed acceptable for their size can buy carbon offsets to make up the difference.

One carbon offset represents the reduction of one metric ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases. The money spent on carbon offsets is invested in renewable energy programmes. The challenge with such a marketplace is to make the cost to organisations buying carbon offsets enough to sustain a renewable energy programme that could make products and services available to enable those organisations to reduce their carbon footprint in the future. The carbon trading market is a transitional vehicle permitting organisations to contribute to a common fund to target greener and renewable energy, ultimately removing the need for the market at some point in the future.

There are two markets in which carbon offsets can be traded, the compliance market described above, and the voluntary market. The voluntary market enables anyone to offset their personal carbon footprint or the carbon footprint of others by making a donation. For example, many airlines permit customers to tick a box to donate an additional amount equivalent to the carbon footprint generated by their flight. Other organisations, like Brighter Planet, provide various tools to manage your footprint including a tool for calculating your personal footprint and credit cards that result in a contribution towards renewable energy projects with each purchase. Their website includes a long list of personal actions you can take to reduce your carbon footprint. The same organisation runs a scheme whereby if you raise awareness in this area, they will donate to the carbon offset fund on your behalf.

You can click on this badge to find out more and contribute in this way yourself:

Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT)

CAT is on a mission to inspire, inform, and enable sustainable living at every level in society.

One of their recent publications is a new energy strategy for a Zero Carbon Britain by 2030.

As Europe's leading Eco-Centre, "Their visitor centre has 7 acres of interactive displays, organic gardens, a cafe, shop and adventure playground. It opened in 1974 when CAT was only a small community starting to put sustainable living to the test. Now the organisation has grown in size and reach, welcoming 50,000 visitors and school children every year, providing free information to over 200,000 people and offering postgraduate courses to 500 students each year."

CAT make information sheets available on a wide range of topics from renewable energy to low impact living. They have various projects to raise awareness, conduct research, and trial new sustainability solutions, sometimes combining all of these into projects like the WISE project, building the Wales Institute for Sustainable Education; "WISE provides a location in which to explore practical solutions to vital changes to the way we live, work, travel and do business. The WISE building embodies everything that will be taught in it, offering a living example of sustainable technologies and lifestyles."

In addition to the post-graduate courses, they run short courses on subjects as diverse as ecologically sound gardening to how to position and install a wind turbine and attach it to the national grid.

Sustainable Development

The UK Government Sustainable Development Website (maintained by defra, the Department for Food and Rural Affairs) sets out the principles for sustainable development in the UK as follows:

To achieve these goals:

1. Living within environmental limits
2. Ensuring a strong, healthy and just society
   
   by:
   
3. Achieving a sustainable economy
4. Using sound science responsibly
5. Promoting good governance

This is a very challenging agenda; not just technically or scientifically, but socially and economically as well. Lets look at some of the tensions between these principles to understand in more detail what success really looks like - what it really involves us doing. By understanding the tensions, or conflicting forces between principles, we understand the problem and the challenges that must be overcome.

The first point, living within environmental limits, is almost a definition of sustainability. To live within environmental limits means that our development does not consume resources faster than they are created (or replenished) by the environment, thus providing for development that can be sustained by the environment. This is the first tension in the above principles. There is a tension between our rate of development and the environment's ability to support it. Put another way, the environment limits our development.


The second point, ensuring a strong, healthy and just society whilst phrased as a goal actually represents the second tension resulting from these principles. Given such principles only tend to arise to guide future behaviour once past behaviour has violated them,we know that there is a strong tendency for us to live outside the environmental limits, and for our development to consume resources in the environment faster than its ability to replenish them. In other words, using our current means of development, our pace of development is faster than can be sustained by the environment. A strong and healthy society presumably develops unhindered by the environment, meaning we need to find more environmentally sustainable ways of developing. A just society means that this strong and healthy pace of development is not limited to a select few but is available to all on the same terms. This is where the complexity arises in emerging environmental regulation - how to come up with rules that change behaviour to be more sustainable in an equitable way for everyone. Another tension here lies in the fact that most people want what is best for them or their family or their business without necessarily considering the wider implications. There is further tension between what is "just" and the nature of capitalism, which does not reward based on what would humanely be called just but rather on economic viability terms, or in accordance with the mass market - the majority is not known for being predominantly just. Capitalism has higher, more ruthless goals. What is best for society is not necessarily best for every individual in it. Just as evolution results in the survival of the fitest in nature, capitalism aims to assure the same for business and the economy. This is not about being just.


The third point, achieving a sustainable economy, translates the environmental sustainability goals into economic goals. In other words, we must develop in a way that can be sustained by the resources provided by the environment whilst also maintaining a healthy economy. The economy reflects behaviour not only in the UK but also how business behaviour within the UK is generating value by comparison to other economies from around the world. The economy is in a sense a measure of how successful our development has been - to what extent the effort expended in that development and the resources consumed have been turned into something that is valued by humanity (valued in the sense of they are willing to pay for it). Another tension here lies in the difference between what we value and what is sustainable. This gives rise to another choice, another avenue for investigation - we can change the way we create value to make it more sustainable, or we can change what we value.


The fourth point, using sound science responsibly, speaks to the way in which we should inform our choices about how to develop, and how to change the way we develop to be more sustainable. If we take the same observation that principles often arise from lessons learned from not following those principles in the past, then we must ensure science is not abused - that science is not used as a means to convince people of a pre-defined agenda as part of a teleological argument, but that science is used with an open and enquiring mind to discover the truth about the cause and effects in nature and between our actions, our development, and the impact on the environment in order to make informed decisions based on understanding rather than rhetoric and ulterior motive. See back to the point about capitalism and the motivations and reward mechanisms that creates.


The fifth point, promoting good governance, is necessary to turn thought into action and to remain true to courses of action that once decided for the balanced greater good, will no doubt have some adverse side effects in particular areas. Governance in many ways is about maintaining perspective and managing behaviour towards an outcome with all the factors in mind. It is very easy to look at one variable in a system and optimise for that whilst throwing all the others out of the window. It is easier to focus on improving the economy whilst ignoring sustainability. Equally if we focus entirely on what is best for the environment, there would be a massive negative impact on the economy. There needs to be a balanced approach that considers both perspectives not just in the short term but in the long term. A healthy economy today is of no use to anyone living in a world where the environment can no longer sustain us in the future. A long term view must be taken over governance that plots a course permitting healthy economic growth whilst ensuring this is sustainable within the context of our environment and the resources we are consuming. This requires serious innovation and change - we need better, more efficient and smarter ways of developing, and we need to take a serious look at our values and how society and education shape these.

Sustainable development will not be achieved through policy and governance alone; it will not be achieved by science and innovation or "Green IT"; it needs social reform. The capitalist economy will always be driven by consumer demand. The consumer will not act in the best interests of the environment - or humanity; they will act in the best interests of themselves (as conditioned by society). Whilst strong governance and principles and sound science are all essential, they are insufficient without an increased awareness in society and a change in the behaviour of every person. This requires a level of increased awareness so strong it changes fundamental patterns of behaviour and judgements about what is cool and what is of value. All of these are building blocks in the solution that must operate in concert to resolve these tensions and achieve sustainable development.

Open Sustainability

Open-Sustainability aims to "harnesses collective intelligence by providing an open approach to which anyone can contribute" via the Open-Sustainability.Org wiki. To this end they have created a Sustainability Governance Framework that can be freely used and collaboratively developed or customised for your specific organisation. They also aim to use the same kind of crowd sourcing techniques as wikipedia to create a listing of sustainable enterprises, or enterprises with sustainability initiatives. They ask a number of questions about each such organisation including an assessment of what stage they are at in this sustainability roadmap:

1. Viewing Compliance as Opportunity
2. Making Value Chains Sustainable
3. Designing Sustainable Products and Services
4. Developing New Business Models
5. Creating Next Practice Platforms

Everyone is invited to join the wiki and fill in a sustainability profile form for their firm or any other firm they are aware of with sustainability initiatives or behaviours. You can go here and profile a sustainable enterprise now. There is even space for contact details so that collaboration between different organisations at different stages in the sustainability roadmap could collaborate and learn from each other.

Sustainability Indexes

The Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI) were launched in 1999 to track the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide and provide a socially responsible investment vehicle.

Dow Jones have demonstrated that Corporate Sustainability is an "investable concept", linking the results to strengthening not just the environment but also the societies and economies of both the developing and developed world.


They say that "Corporate Sustainability is a business approach that creates long-term shareholder value by embracing opportunities and managing risks deriving from economic, environmental and social developments". They define a set of criteria and weightings broadly categorised into economic, environmental and social measures to assess the corporate sustainability of an organisation. These assessments are carried out on an ongoing basis and entry into the index is conditional on maintaining performance against these metrics.

The oil company BP plc. was removed from the DJSI on May 31, 2010 due to the extent of the oil-spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and its foreseeable long-term effects on the environment and the local population. Whilst negative publicity created by such disasters often has an immediate impact on shareholder value, the market and public opinion is often fickle. Its removal from the DJSI however could represent a longer term impact as third party investment portfolios guided by DJSI as an arbiter and focussed on sustainability continue to invest elsewhere.

Such indexes create a more consistent influence on investment behaviour and in turn on the corporate behaviour of public firms, not just informing socially responsible investment decisions but influencing the behaviour of public firms towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Put simply, this is Carrot and Stick Corporate Social Responsibility and the DJSI is a judge of which tool is most appropriate.

Whilst Dow Jones may have led the way by creating the first sustainability index, this has now become a firmly established part of economic theory and practice.

The FTSE setup the FTSE4Good Index Series, which has been designed to measure the performance of companies that meet globally recognised corporate responsibility standards. Their aim is to make their brand the choice for responsible investment products.

Scaling this up to performance of countries and Government's abilities to meet their environmental goals: Between 1999 and 2006, variations on this thinking have been further developed by the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy with Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), and the World Economic Forum resulting in the 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index and subsequent 2008 Environmental Performance Index.

The latest Environmental Performance Index is now available as an interactive website. The 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators tracked across ten policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. These indicators provide a gauge at a national government scale of how close countries are to established environmental policy goals.

Sustainability is moving more and more towards science, business, management, economics and law.

Sustainable Growth?

First, a few short definitions to get on the same page.

Sustainable (Adjective)

Able to be sustained for an indefinite period without damaging the environment, or without depleting a resource; resources are renewed by the environment at a rate greater than or equal to the rate of consumption

Able to work in harmony with the environment as part of an ecosystem

Growth (Noun)

An increase in size, number, value, or strength

An increase in wealth, power, knowledge, or wisdom

Trees grow, people grow, businesses grow, societies grow, memes grow

Meme (Noun)

A shared idea that propagates through the medium of human communication (or observation)

Examples include philosophy, culture, religion, political stances, values, complex emotions

The spread of the idea of sustainability through human consciousness is a meme

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Sustainable Growth?

Most commonly sought forms of growth are not sustainable.

In Business, for example, sustainable growth in market share makes no sense at all as the total market size expressed as a share is and always will be exactly 100%. So if you reach 100% market share you cannot grow your share any more. You can grow the market but that is not sustainable either as the maximum potential market is finite (assuming we stick to the earth for now). This translates equally to revenue or profit. Growth in these things cannot be sustained indefinitely. Most people are thinking much shorter term than this; sustainability to them is often limited to the duration of their interest, role, position, responsibility.

In Energy, we are consuming natural resources like oil significantly faster than the environment is producing them. Any process that consumes resources faster than the environment produces them is not sustainable.

We plant certain kinds of trees because they can grow quickly and supply wood for manufacturing or fuel. This seems sustainable as the areas that are harvested are replanted. However, the more we use this "sustainable solution" the more space we need to use for planting trees. The products that can be created from a sustainable wood supply or the fires that can be fueled from it are limited by the rate of growth of the trees. Our rate of consumption is still growing. So actually its not a sustainable solution. Its halting the degradation of the environment for a while.

A Balanced view. Lets come at this from the other side for just a moment. The Earth, with or without humanity is not sustainable. Not strictly speaking. It will be uninhabitable in less than a billion years due to the expansion of the sun into a red giant. It will be totally engulfed (destroyed) shortly after that. So no earth bound process is sustainable by the strict definition of sustainability.

So here is the challenge. That is not a very useful definition as it has no place on earth where it can be applied. The language we are using is technically inadequate so people naturally adapt it because they want to communicate and they more or less know what they are trying to say despite not having the words to say it. People are using "sustainability" to mean different things. That's fine. There will be some confusion and meaningless debate but people are smart. They can make sense of this. So what are they all talking about? This is part of the challenge of communication. We need to use our common sense and feel our way towards meaningful discussion without getting drawn into irrelevant side-debates that are the result of talking cross-purposes.

For most purposes, proponents of sustainable solutions are talking about solutions that use renewable energy sources, meaning that the solution consumes resources from the environment at a slower rate than the environment is producing those resources. This seems like a very simple sustainability test. The trouble is the number of solutions and applications of those solutions - the overall complexity of what we are doing and the fact that the population is rising and increasing its use of such energy hungry solutions that creates the sustainability issue and makes it difficult to analyse or agree about. People have immediate needs and these are rarely going to take second place to long-termism.

As far as business is concerned, despite many organisations having strategies for sustainable growth, the only meaningful sustainability is success. The meaning of success of course changes with time, as the market changes, as the demands of the consumers or customers change, and as the nature of competition and collaboration changes.

Sustainable success makes sense. Sustainable success is more about creating and sustaining a meme or set of meme's around values. This is what drives behaviour. Your choice about who you work with then naturally becomes more about what they stand for and how this correlates to your values - your ability to sustain success, whatever that means to you. Collaboration based on values rather than profit yields success. Profit always has its place in an economically driven society, but economy as a tool rather than a driver is more likely to lead to real success... is more likely to be part of a sustainable way of being.

This blog collects together thoughts, ideas, solutions, commentary on sustainability.