I’ve been involved with sustainability for a long time now. I’ve worked at the biggest and most powerful organizations involved in the issues: WTO, top think tank, government ministry, oil major, private consulting. I’ve seen it from top to bottom and here’s the one thing I can tell you:
Sustainability will never happen until we manage to attach it to positive monetary profitability.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that to become truly viable and actually change the world the way it needs to, sustainability requires fundamentally recreating the incentives for what constitutes value and creating a financial mechanism that generates currency based on that.
Trying to make sustainability happen only through negative profitability such as efficiency will not work because we can’t build new sustainability value principles on top of an old system that runs directly counter to those principles. Nor can we just obsess about doing a bunch of cutting in our old ways of doing things because that still indirectly means accepting and pursuing legacy notions of value as our economic core. It’s a distraction, not even a bandaid.
Putting sustainability as our new core for positive value generating is about how we link value with currency and the mechanisms with which we generate and transmit that currency for use elsewhere. It is about the very basis of how our economic transactioning activities occur and how we get paid for work. Until that basis becomes our focus we are, in the words of Jonathan Franzen, just pretending. To solve this problem, in short, we need to change how money is created and how it is acquired by individuals and groups through work.
A big problem right now is that we are not looking in the right place. Rather than pursuing economic fundamentals everybody seems busy looking for something to blame. It’s government inaction’s fault. It’s fossil fuel producer’s fault. It’s investment bank’s fault. Or this or that international cabal, these particular industries or financiers etc etc.
I was never quite so finger-pointy but I did use to think that pursuing behavior change of “key actors and organizations” of the legacy system kind could work. That with the right influence and willing leadership in place this sustainability thing could morph into place through harnessing the power of the structures and systems we already have. But that isn’t true.
Why?
Because the fundamental principles of the economic system we have owns these structures, not the other way around. These actors, key though they may be for the maintenance of the old system, are the worst possible agents for changing it.
Changing the parameters of what money is and how it works to promote sustainability through positive profitability will never come through the legacy system. Nor is it necessary to “bring down” that system. In fact, that would make things a lot worse. What is needed is creating an alternative monetary basis that can grow and gain its own momentum on the side of the legacy system. One that makes possible positive profitable work that is monetarily compensated with a viable currency rooted in the principles of sustainability. The key is to take control of monetary compensation to fundamentally favor work that is naturally propelling of sustainability priorities.
Again, trying to build new sustainability priorities on top of the old system while still accepting its fundamental parameters is pretty much guaranteed to make those new priorities fail. As a famous management writer said: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Our system of money is no exception to this rule.
This all boils down to two related things that are the keys to making sustainability work for real:
We need to create a new mechanism for generating and earning money that is fundamentally and directly based in the principles of sustainability. Allowing the core generative ability to remain in the legacy system while “funneling” a bit here and there to sustainability investments fundamentally keeps the legacy system in control. There needs to be a shift of sustainability principles occupying the core generative place for money rather than being dependent on charity from legacy generating methods;
Directly following from this we need to let work and jobs be generated from this basis and have positive profitability create its own momentum in a way that works with the grain of sustainability rather than against it.
I wrote this manifesto because this is the approach with which I want to be involved in sustainability. But I don’t think I’m alone. If you are interested, have thoughts, or just want to talk more about it, reach out to me. The more people we get on board to think about this the more power we will have to put a new basis for making money into the real world.
Johan Westberg
