Discussed:  IKEA, Nike, sustainablity, cradle to cradle, Minnesota, natural resources, systems analysis, Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Quetico, ecology, Maslow, Manfred Max-Neef, Happiness Index

Tucked away in a pre-war honeycomb of Park Slope’s brownstone hive, up a funky flight of stairs, and into a tidy domesticated bohemian living room adorned with entomology specimens juxtaposed with wedding photos, a light and local snack was arranged for me, elegantly prepared on an old cherry wood dining table. This is where I was greeted by Maura Dilley, Sustainability Expert, Master of Science, and hostess for the afternoon.

Q: What is it about organizational development for sustainability? What does that mean exactly?

A: Organizational development for sustainability is when you go into an organization, a company, or a government agency, or an NGO and you develop a common language and a common understanding of sustainability so that the company, NGO, or government agency can move strategically toward sustainable goals. So it’s not just having the President say, “We wanna be green!” or not having the Environmental Department saying, “Please be green!” It’s getting everyone on board and working together to synergize everyone’s efforts.

Q: Soup to nuts. All encompassing. Procurement, hiring, transportation…

A: Yeah, the philosophy is all encompassing. This is something that IKEA has done and Nike is beginning to do and some other big companies that you may or may not love but what they do is they incorporate sustainability training into their employee training so when you’re learning how to do the job, you’re learning how to do the job according to sustainable principles. Nowadays, everyone wants to “go green” and become “sustainable” but so few people really know what that means. You would hire someone like me or some of my other colleagues out there and they come in and they’re kind of like a school nurse, the school nurse for sustainability. And everyone comes to them and I give out the flu shots and we come together and work on projects and the projects are based on sustainable principles and through these activities you learn, in your head, how to do sustainable psycho-analysis when you’re making a new product, for example, you’ll be able to click it off in your head and say, “Well, where did this product really come from?” and “Where is it going to go after the consumer’s done with it? and “How am I designing?” and “How can I design it better so it doesn’t hurt people along the way?”

Q: Cradle to cradle.

A: Yeah, cradle to cradle.

Q: Is that a buzzword in your field?

A: Yeah, it is a buzzword. This is my personal philosophy: What’s going on here is that people are looking for tools, they’re looking for one-offs, or they’re looking for something that sounds really good and cradle to cradle is something that sounds really good and a LEED certified building is something that sounds really good and just recycling more, for Pete’s sake, that sounds really good. So a lot of today’s environmental programs, so-called environmental programs are going after these goals. Once you get 100% recycling at your building facility, where are you at? Are you any closer to being sustainable? If you were to take a step back and work from a systems-based approach to sustainability; when you take a bird’s eye view of sustainability, you place your company, your organization, within society, within the biosphere, you realize that we have certain constraints because we’re human beings, we live on this planet and there’s things that we can do and there’s things that we can’t do to maintain a sustainable society.

If your goal is such that, well, “I want 100% of recycling,” but you’re bringing in all these materials, you’re bringing in plastic water bottles for your employees to use and then you recycle them 100%. Is that really… have you really accomplished anything? I mean, I’m not quite so sure. I think it probably would’ve been a better idea to set up reusable water resources like bottles that can be refilled at the tap and your employees go off like that. People are going towards buzzwords and things that they, out of the goodness of their hearts, think is what’s best for their company, you get these kind of reductionist resolutions to these problems. If you take a step back, look at your company as a system, what comes into your system, what goes out of your system, what are the produces of your system, what are the spinoff effects of your work… then you have a much better handle on where your real environmental impact is. So the first thing you’d want to do is definitely get assessed, do an energy assessment, and also do a waste assessment.

Q: Do you provide that too or would you organize that? Or do you have a company that you would work with, like an energy assessment company? I know that in New Jersey, PSE&G does it and they’ll have a guy, like a science adviser, who comes out and does it.

A: Definitely. Well, there’s a lot of great resources out there like you’re mentioning. What my personal passion is is really changing minds like paradigm shifts for sustainability. So, if I had a choice between having a company that had all the bells and whistles and got these energy audits and did all this stuff but they didn’t know why there were doing it, and that sustainability isn’t just about the environment. Sustainability also implicates social sustainability and there are sustainability problems that have nothing to do with climate change. There are sustainability problems that have nothing to do with recycling and if we stopped climate change and recycled absolutely everything, hell, if we designed products that didn’t even need recycling because they would biodegrade in your backyard, we would still have sustainability problems in our social realms. So we would have abuses of power, we would have people that don’t get equal rights to education, and we would have lack of food, for example, perhaps. And these are all sustainability problems as well and we need to put them all together because they’re all part and parcel of our sick society that needs to be addressed holistically.

Q: How did you get into this noble line of work?

A: I’ve always cared about people. I was raised in Minnesota, I was raised in the woods on the shores of a lake which we drank out water out of. We had a pump that ran down our hill.

Q: How was that lake water?

A: Yep. It was lake water and we had a little filter to take out the pebbles and the little fishies and it was great, I loved it! I just loved the idea that when I was out swimming I could duck my head under and take a gulp of water, it’s always been really special to me, a very spiritual communion.

Q: Can you still do that?

A: Nope. No you can’t.

Q: So in your lifetime, you’ve seen a resource that was vital to your existence growing up that you can’t access anymore.

A: Yeah! It’s really hard for us, you know, it’s over now. And not only that, we’re in Northern Minnesota about a mile and a half from the Canadian boarder and we’ve had these horrible wild fires and we installed sprinkler systems on the house so our house was saved, the structure’s still there but the wildfires went completely all over the property, jumped the lake, went to the islands. If you’re not familiar with the area, it’s just lake upon lake upon lake with maybe a mile, a half mile, a quarter mile in between and you can pick up your canoe, walk from one lake to another and carry on. It’s a protected area, it’s a national park on our side, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and it’s a national park on the Canadian side, it’s called the Quetico so it’s hundreds of miles of raw wilderness. In the last five years, in different fires, the whole thing has burned down.

Q: Is that a cyclical process on it’s own?

A: It does happen naturally on it’s own. Wildfires are part of forest ecology, they’re very important. I’m not a forester but from my observation in my lifetime, I’m 27 years old, and I’ve never seen so many fires.

Q: You bring up the idea of climate change and having been able to see it in your lifetime and I’m sort of bringing up the idea, well, would these changes have happened on their own anyway… when we’re talking about sustainability and we’re talking about systems and governments and Plan 2020 and Dublin and, I mean, what is the ultimate solution? Are we looking at the short term which is financial or are we really concerned that what we’re doing is going to have an effect on these anthropogenic emissions and their effect on the global climate… I mean, what are we trying to do here?

A: Well, I think that we’re trying to maintain meaning in our lives. I think that our resources are depleting, our populations are increasing and our stores of meaning are depleting.

Q: It’s almost as if we have to reclaim meaning in our lives. I mean, we’ve let it get so out of control… modernization… industrialization…

A: That’s a values judgment and I don’t care to go there. I think if you look at it plain and simple, is it easier or harder to do business these days? It’s harder. Is it easier or harder to find clean water these days? It’s harder. Is it easier or harder to build a house these days? Resources are becoming so expensive. It’s much harder. Is it more likely that you’re going to get cancer these days? It’s a lot more likely; childhood cancer rates are through the roof. Call it modernity, call it what you’d like, I don’t want to get into those sort of statements and derail the conversation. I think our opportunities are depleting and I think it’s because of the way we run our society so I’d like to open that up.

You and I sitting here in this room, we’re in one system, we’re in the system of this house. Within that system we had lunch earlier and I brought this food in and where is the food gonna go? Part of it’s going into the bathroom, part of it’s going into the compost bin, part of it’s going into the garbage can and going to a landfill. So just doing a systems analysis of this house, that’s one system. Then we take a step back and we’re in Brooklyn, New York, and we’re in New York City, all the laws that exist here, all of the schools that exist here, all of the streets, the grids, how did you get here, that’s a system. We take another step back and all of a sudden, we’re in the biosphere which is a whole different idea. In the biosphere, we know certain facts about the biosphere, we know that nothing disappears and we know that everything spreads. I didn’t make that up, that’s the first and second rule of thermodynamics and it seems kind of lofty to some people but I think we really need to talk about it. If nothing disappears and everything spreads, then why in the world would we be making something that we can’t biodegrade? That we can’t absorb into our bodies and take care of? Why would we be doing that? And if everything spreads and nothing disappears then we should be really concerned about what we’re putting out there into the environment because it’s all coming back to us.

Q: So, bottom line, what is sustainability all about?

A: Sustainability is really about maintaining the human experience on the planet earth. Everyone says, “we’re destroying the earth… we’re destroying the earth… we’re destroying the earth…” but I’ve got news for you, the earth is here to stay. It’s us. We’re the problem, we’re the one’s who are in danger. It’s people.

Q: We’re going to be uncomfortable.

A: We’re going to be uncomfortable, we’re going to be hot, we’re going to be crowded, we’re going to be eaten alive by bugs.

Q: Or each other.

A: Or each other! That’s what we really need to be concerned with. Thinking of sustainability as essentially a human problem, it’s not the earth that’s going crazy, it’s humans that are going crazy, it’s a human problem so let’s talk about human needs. What are the needs that are driving us to destroy our place so we talk about self-preservation and that whole philosophy but we’re not acting in that way in our daily lives. There are a certain set of human needs and we’ve heard of Maslow’s human needs and there’s another economist who has a set of human needs and his name is Manfred Max-Neef and he’s from Chile. What he’s done is he had nine human needs and they’re not hierarchical. He says, beyond staying alive, eating, and not freezing to death, there’s these nine basic human needs that we all have to satisfy to create the human experience. What’s interesting is that these needs are the same throughout time and in all different cultures, it’s the satisfiers that are different. So if we can identify the need within an action, if we can identify the need within a fuel-intensive SUV vehicle that’s putting all this carbon out into the air, what’s the need, what drove that individual to need that vehicle, then you’re in a much better position to substitute it or dematerialize it, to influence change in that person’s life.

And so the needs that we’re talking about are: subsistence, protection, affection, idleness (which is very interesting), identity, freedom, creativity, participation, and understanding. So, if you start thinking about something like idleness, idleness is an essential part of the human experience, that we require time to just sit there and stare at the wall, as opposed to our business model that we have to be active all the time and always putting out this output, that kind of gives you a very different idea of how we’re going to survive and how we’re going to make ourselves happy.

So if you look at the Happiness Index, which is the alternative GNP, the Happiness Index looks at countries and says. “Who’s the happiest country?” And you’d be amazed to see the countries that are at the top of this list as opposed to the countries at the top of the list of the GNP. People who are at the top of the Happiness Index live in places like Butan and several sub-Saharan African countries and then way down it, you get to places like Scandinavia or countries in Europe whereas countries on the GNP is almost exactly flipped. So, if you’re measuring people’s well-being by money as opposed to people’s well-being based on human needs, you get a very different picture of the situation. And I think if we start there, what truly makes us happy and what truly are our goals as a society, my goal is to live a happy life where I’m satisfied and I feel protected and loved, then how do I get to those goals without destroying something along the way. And I think that’s really the crux of sustainability.

So, look at it from the top, look at it from a bird’s eye view, remember that all systems are connected, remember that nothing disappears and everything spreads, and remember that we’re doing it for people, so put people first.

Photo courtesy of Maura Dilley.