Beautiful Sustainability

Must sustainability be beautiful?   A simple thought experiment suggests that his is the case–try to imagine future generations thanking us for providing for them to with the means of survival but in a world without beauty.   Not only is it difficult to imagine such a generation, it is perhaps impossible even to imagine a world in which survival was possible but which was devoid of beauty.  This experiment, then, is convincing as far as it goes, but it does not generate much productive thought because it only presents beauty in its hard-to-imagine absence.

A much more generative line of thought for supporting the premise that sustainability must be beautiful is found in Frederick Turner’s singular book Beauty:  The Value of Values in which he uses his deep learning in both science and the humanities to develop several important theses including:

“7. Beauty is a fundamental reality”

“7a. Beauty… connects past and future, the known and the unknown.”

“7b. Beauty is culturally universal and goes beyond the subjective self and beyond inner desire; it is a true description of the real world.”

“7c. Beauty is the guide of politics, as it is the core of morality and speculative understanding; it is not the handmaiden of politics.”

“7d. Beauty is the defining property of Being, but only if Being is conceived of as complicated, interfered-with, reflexive, epistemological, and at least potentially aware in its very essence.”

As we adopt Turner’s understanding of the profound centrality of beauty we can to begin to  cast sustainability as a practice of creating what Robert Fritz has termed “advancing structures.”  We can we envision beautiful future states that, as a result of their beauty, help create the structural tension needed to create them.   This is a radically different understanding of sustainability than that provided by manipulative fear mongers such as Al Gore. It is a model based in which the key elements are creating and beauty rather than elements such as avoiding, ugliness, and terror.

I very much like the idea of looking back on the coming decade as suggested here:

Sustainability. More than anything, the first ten years of the 21st century will be remembered as the decade that businesses went green — if only in their marketing to a public highly attuned to Al Gore’s inconvenient truth. We’re not cynical on this point, however. The efforts we see by companies large and small to reduce their carbon footprints and other environmental impacts are sincere and effective, as far as they go. But ten years from now, as we revisit this exercise, forgive us if we declare 2010-2020 to be the decade of sustainability. “The idea was in the air before 2010,” we can picture ourselves writing. “But this was the decade when it really took hold.”

http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2010/01/the_decade_in_management_ideas.html

The work Shai Agassi’s team is doing is a great example of how accepting sustainability as a goal and responding to the constraints of the real world can lead to a  response which is generative in the same way that an artist response to context and constraints can be generative.

Shai Agassi Discusses the Elecric Car Revolution.

This blog will reflect my strongly held belief that the goal of  sustainability strategies must be more than simply ongoing survival.  I agree with John R. Ehrenfeld, that “the most basic symbol of sustainability is that of flourishing.  It pertains to all natural systems, both humans and other living  systems.  For humans, flourishing means more than just remaining healthy.  It also means living the good life, following the precepts handed down over the ages by sages and philosophers.” (see his Sustainability by Design page 7).  This blog is called Beautiful Sustainability, because the value of beauty provides a positive motivation for us that can brings out our best and most creative efforts.  If avoiding our demise is the stick, beauty is the carrot and our personal experience and most management theories teach us that it is carrots that bring out the best in people.