Flourishing on a Biophysically Limited Planet: Creating a Culture of Sustainability

A high and sustainable quality of life is a central goal for humanity. Our current socio-ecological regime and its set of interconnected worldviews, institutions, and technologies all support the vision of unlimited growth of material production and consumption as a proxy for quality of life. However, abundant evidence shows that, beyond a certain threshold, further material growth no longer significantly contributes to improvement in quality of life. Not only does further material growth not meet humanity’s central goal, there is mounting evidence that it creates significant roadblocks to sustainability through increasing resource constraints (i.e., peak oil, water limitations) and sink constraints (i.e., climate disruption). Overcoming these roadblocks and creating a sustainable and desirable future will require an integrated, systems level redesign of our socio-ecological regime focused explicitly and directly on the goal of sustainable quality of life rather than the proxy of unlimited material growth. This transition, like all cultural transitions, will occur through an evolutionary process, but one that we, to a certain extent, can control and direct through the process of shared envisioning. Visions and models of integrated sets of worldviews, institutions, and technologies are needed to stimulate and seed this evolutionary redesign.  The process of creating a shared vision of the future is also a key element of real democracy. 

This talk explores cultural evolution, processes for creating shared visions and models to feed that evolution, and some specific visions of how a sustainable and desirable future for humanity could look. There is already a high degree of overlapping consensus about the major features of this desirable future – one that respects biophysical boundaries, distributes resources and responsibilities fairly, and adequately values and balances built, human, social and natural capital assets. We now need to accelerate the shared visioning process and the search for real, integrated solutions.  We also need to communicate the results to a much wider audience using the rapidly emerging democratic capabilities of the internet.