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Within the space of just a few decades the term sustainability has made an extraordinary rise to fame
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Going from the fringes to the mainstream as it has become one of the defining features of 21st century reality
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Today the term sustainability
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Encompasses a whole paradigm shift to our understanding of the world and our place within it
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this new paradigm of sustainability is set to have a
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Fundamental and pervasive effect on how we manage and design systems in the 21st century as it will affect all
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aspects of our economy
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this short film explores the ongoing transformation in the structure of our economies as a new form of
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sustainable economy emerges
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The environment represents the whole ecosystem that a society depends upon for various services such as water
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Materials food and energy when we refer to the environment
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We are really talking about a combination of natural ecosystem and human economy. What is called a socio ecological?
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system
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the nature of socio ecological
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Systems has changed fundamentally over the course of human history as we have developed new technologies
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institutions and tapped into new energy sources the
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Development of the practice of agriculture some 8,000 years ago
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Represented the first fundamental change in this dynamic as we created systematic processes for harnessing natural
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resources based around the technology of farming
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At this point in history humans were dispersed across the continents and the Neolithic Revolution was ongoing
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The Neolithic Revolution was a fundamental change in the socio ecological
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systems of the time where the shift from hunting and gathering to
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Agriculture led to permanent settlements the establishment of social classes
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the eventual rise of urban living and large
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civilizations
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Before the modern era people were very much aware of their environmental limitations
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interactions within socio ecological
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systems were local in nature
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the majority of traditional societies are the net result of a long process of
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coevolution between a group of people and their natural environment which created strong
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limitations to what was physically and biologically possible and what was not the majority of people were
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Small-scale subsistence farmers most of the agricultural production was for home consumption
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Agricultural techniques were adapted to local
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environmental conditions the amount of land that each family could cultivate
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was limited by the large amount of human or animal labour that was necessary for agriculture for
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Thousands of years agrarianism formed the foundations to many civilizations that rose and fell around the world
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The rise of the modern era some 500 years ago in Europe
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Created the context for a whole new dynamic in the relationship between humans and their natural
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environment
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With a shift from a dominant pre-modern religious vision of the world
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To a modern scientific view came a whole new way of seeing the natural environment
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This new scientific knowledge got directly applied to the engineering of our physical environment
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Giving rise to the explosive technological change. That was the Industrial Revolution
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The Industrial Revolution that started in the late 1700s
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represented a radical
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dislocation between society and the ecosystem
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Agriculture changed in Europe when the Industrial Revolution made it possible to use machines
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Instead of human and animal labor for work such as plowing fields and harvesting crops
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Starting with mechanization the chain of effects can be traced through as machines gave farmers the ability to cultivate
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larger areas of land
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farm sizes and worker productivity
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increased
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Dramatically as mechanized agriculture is more efficient on a larger scale
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The mass of society moved from working the land into the newly industrializing urban centers
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where large markets for goods and labor came the new
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Organizational structure prevailing over their daily subsistence and a new way of life that was divorced from local
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ecosystems emerged a
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Major part of this changing dynamic was the harnessing of new energy sources that were greatly more
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Powerful than anything humans had used fuel their economies before the large-scale
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combustion to the energy sources of coal oil and gas
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Enabled the transition to new mass
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manufacturing processes as they shifted from manual to mechanical
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these initial changes in technology economy society and ecology set in motion a series of changes such as
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Increasing economies of scale CO modification and urbanization that through interconnected feedback loops
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Continues to this day in many countries around the world
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Although it is apparent that the Industrial Revolution
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Assured in an unprecedented global human impact on the planet. It has since been dwarfed by the extraordinary
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Exponential growth of human economic activity that began in the mid 20th century
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many of the processes of change that began with the Industrial Revolution
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Reached a take-off point in the mid-to-late 20th century as almost all indicators for economy and ecosystem
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Started changing at an exponential rate from population growth to loss of species to energy consumption
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this great acceleration of economic activity has given birth to a new geological era that scientists call the
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Anthropocene as human industrial activity has become the primary driver of changes within earth systems
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the Anthropocene represents a new form of socio ecological
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System one that is truly global in nature
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With an unprecedented scale of alteration to Earth's core systems such as overall
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biodiversity climate or ocean acidity
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After 1950 changes in major earth systems became directly linked to changes largely related to the global
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economic system
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This is a new phenomenon a truly profound
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transformation in our socio ecological systems one that we are far from understanding the consequences of
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Within the course of just a few decades
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We have transitioned from being a small world on a big planet to being a big world on a small planet and extraordinary
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transformation a switch from making limited ad hoc interventions into
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Ecosystems to becoming the primary drivers of change within the biophysical processes of the entire planet
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These changes and their potential consequences are being made most
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Explicit to us through the changes and climate that we are currently witnessing
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through human industrial interventions the feedback mechanisms that stabilize and regulate Earth's systems have been
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Significantly degraded both within local ecosystems and increasingly on the global level
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the breaking of these stabilizing negative feedback loops increases
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Destabilizing positive feedback that makes the system more unstable and thus generates more extreme events
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What scientists call global weirding?
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We have benefited for over 10,000 years since the beginning of the Holocene
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from Earth regulating itself to create an environment conducive for human economic activity the
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Anthropocene is a recognition that this stable geological era has ended that
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because of human intervention in the biosphere
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It can no longer stabilize itself within the same equilibrium that has benefited societies in the past
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That the global economy is now the primary driver of change within ecosystems
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The name sustainability is derived from the Latin word
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Sustainer a meaning to hold and sustain meaning to maintain or endure
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Sustainability then defines the ability of a system or process to endure over a period of time
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How sustainable something is can be understood in terms of its overall
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Efficiency in terms of how effective the whole organization is at operating within its environment
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When a system becomes inefficient at operating within its environment
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It consumes more of the available resources and produces more entropy or waste
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rendering it
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unsustainable
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Sustainability is though not a property of a thing things in isolation cannot be sustainable
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Sustainability is more what we call an emergent feature of whole systems
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It is not so much about the parts as how the parts work together to enable effective overall outcomes
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for example
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An electric car is not really sustainable if the power system it is running on
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Imports coal from the other side of the planet to provide it with electricity
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or likewise if we build an eco home in the middle of suburbia where the
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Inhabitants have to drive a long distance to do shopping or take their kids to the park. This again will not achieve
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sustainable outcomes because we are simply optimizing individual parts without
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optimizing the whole it is precisely because sustainability is about a
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Relationship between a whole system and its environment that it cannot be achieved through optimizing individual parts
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But instead requires us to look at how whole systems work how all the parts are interrelated
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to enable the emergence of an affair and overall system and thus
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sustainable results
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This is to a large extent why sustainability presents such an intractable challenge to our existing institutional framework
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Traditionally we take a very analytical approach to management
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We break system's down into their parts
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Analyze the parts and try to optimize them thinking that if all the parts are working then the whole will be working in
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relatively simple systems this kind of
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reductionist approach can work but in something as complex as an entire economy or
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global supply chain
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it comes to be more how the parts are interrelated into the whole that comes to matter if
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We wanted to try and make a supply chain more efficient
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We can only get so far by getting each business to optimize their activity in isolation
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Before we need to look at the coordination across the whole supply network
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Often when we focus solely on the parts
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We simply shift problems to the whole organization and because of that we stay getting the same overall
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ineffective outcomes and
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unsustainable results
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The Industrial Age management methods and institutional structures that we inherit today are designed to take an analytical approach
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Braking problems down solving the parts and then putting them back together
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sustainability is though a complex and holistic challenge that is not amenable to this method although
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Optimizing for the parts may be important in many circumstances. It is really designing and managing for the whole system
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That is ultimately required to achieve the end result of overall
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sustainability
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whether we are talking about sustainability with respect to the natural environment or with respect to social institutions an
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Unsustainable system is one where the value and integrity of the whole organization is being systematically
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depleted all
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Organizations require both effective parts and effective overall structures for integrating those part
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Into a functioning Hall when the integrity of the hall becomes reduced then the system becomes unsustainable
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When the social capital within a society the trust within the social bonds of the community
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Becomes depleted it is only a matter of time before an event occurs creating a crisis. That would have easily been
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Resolved given a normal level of trust within the community and this is the essence of sustainability
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It is not a thing
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It is the value and integrity of the whole organization that is required to maintain it over time
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Whether this is the value of the social bonds within a society
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or the species diversity that forms the food web within an ecosystem a
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Sustainable system is one that is integrated into a functioning whole organization
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We traditionally focus on the parts in an organization because they are much easier to touch
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quantify and manage while the value in the connections that interrelates them into an effective whole
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Typically cannot be touched or broken down into individual discrete parts and is often much more difficult to quantify
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Making it difficult to manage through our traditional methods
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This value of the whole is nonlinear meaning it is distributed out across the whole
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Organization it is not one species that maintains the diversity within an ecosystem. It is all of them
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It is not the closely knit bonds between people of a similar background that maintains a resilient multicultural society
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It is more the distributed weak ties between people of different
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Backgrounds that ensures the overall integrity of the community. It's a resilience and sustainability
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it is this integrity of the whole ecosystem or society that represents the
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Infrastructure or fixed capital that supports and enables it to operate effectively and provide people with the derivatives
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they value and
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In managing such capital one cannot look at and measure one single connection or one single creature
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One has to look at all of them. This is the nature of nonlinear phenomena
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it is because these resources within an ecosystem economy society or culture that ensure the functioning of the whole and its
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Sustainability are distributed that traditional centralized management methods are ineffective
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whenever we manage for the parts without managing for the whole we eventually deplete the integrity that
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supports the whole and end up with unsustainable
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outcomes
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At the beginning of the modern era we inherited a natural environment and a set of social and cultural institutions
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That evolved over millennia without our full understanding or appreciation of them
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With the accelerated growth during the 20th century we came to affect the structure and makeup of these whole systems that were
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Providing the natural and social capital supporting our modern economy
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So much so that today they are no longer
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Self-managing. The requirement today is in understanding these macro structures how they work their value and
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Developing organizational structures that can appropriately manage them
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sustainable development is a form of development where we manage both on the level of the individual technologies and
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Organizations but also on the level of the system as a whole
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This is why achieving a sustainable form of global economy will take us into a new world of complexity
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Because we have to look at account for and manage whole interconnected socio ecological
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systems in order to achieve overall sustainable outcomes
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What gets measured gets managed and managing for the whole means accounting for the whole what is called full cost accounting
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our traditional approach to
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Macroscale environmental management has been exercised through a top-down centralized model driven by government
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institutions and based on a paradigm of environmental conservation
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But this is no longer relevant in an age when industrial activity has become an embedded part and central driver of change
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within virtually all ecosystems around the planet
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Ecosystems management can no longer be an ad hoc solution patched into the side of the economy
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This new context requires that it become a central part of what the economy is and does and this requires
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accounting for and
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incorporating both social and natural capital in market structures
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economies function as distributed management systems
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Through the negative feedback loops of the market they manage whatever it is that people value can quantify and exchange
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Until very recently. We have only really valued the derivatives of ecosystems the water food minerals
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Etc in terms of their utility to which we could ascribe a financial value
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through industrialization
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Industrial and financial capital has grown and ecosystems have become degraded
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Today the limits and scarcity are not in lack of human engineered systems
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but in natural capital in the industrial age
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We had a scarcity of people and capital but an abundance of natural capital
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Today, we have an abundance of people and goods but scarcity of natural capital
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so it is now not industry and people that need to be
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Economized but natural capital that we need to be using more efficiently and creating an economy to do that
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completing the process of industrialization means people's value change subtly but importantly at
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This stage in economic development. The scarcity is no longer in the derivatives of ecosystems
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But instead the functional integrity of those ecosystems
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This integrity of the ecosystem can't be fully measured in terms of monetary utility rather
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It requires a different kind of capital called natural capital
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using economic and business models to manage ecosystems means firstly
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understanding those ecosystems and the value of their integrity and
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Then developing accounting and exchange mechanisms based around this
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ultimately, this means building a new dimension to the economy a new value system for the quantifying exchanging and
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accounting for natural capital this process of incorporating the inherent value of
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ecosystems into economic metrics has already begun and will likely
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intensify in the coming decades
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Since economies are always about people and what they value
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as the context changes as those values change and as the nature of the resource that needs to be
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Economize changes, so does the economy adapt?
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But this adaption won't simply fit into our current economic model
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It will require that Industrial Age economic structures evolve into a more complex
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multi-dimensional form
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Managing for the whole means managing for the connections between things a
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central part of the rise of environmental awareness over the past few decades has been a growing recognition of the linear model to our
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existing economy
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Indeed today. This linear model is probably the most often identified and criticized
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structural feature to our existing industrial economy driving
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unsustainable results
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This linear economic model is captured in the popular description of the economy as a process of take make and dispose
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But as the economy has grown and reached planetary limits
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inputs are appearing more limited and outputs have become increasingly detrimental to ecosystems as
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Limits are increasingly met the emphasis is shifting from gross throughput of material and energy to the internal organization
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Through which those resources are utilized
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This new form of economy is called the circular economy
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Built on the idea of feedback. Loops that things don't just disappear
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Materials and energy go on existing after we use them and this can be a massive source of value
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The circular approach is a concept that has risen to prominence and takes its central insights from living systems
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It considers that our systems should work like organisms
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Processing nutrients that can be fed back into the cycle
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From this perspective a sustainable economy is one without dead ends with solutions in a sustainable
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economy built on closing loops between different energy and material flows and
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converting them into cycles
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This nonlinear lifecycle view to products and processes
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Necessitates a more complex holistic view of the systems we design and manage
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One that looks for the synergistic connections works with feedback loops and whole systems instead of discrete one-off products
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Developing a truly circular economy requires diversity and the interconnecting of different systems
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Systems and processes that are all the same consume the same resources and produce the same outputs
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Without the capacity to cycle them between the different elements
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It is only by connecting different systems in the right way that we can harness their differences to create
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synergies between them
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Diversity has to be built into the structure of the economy
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with different processes and systems coexisting and thriving off of each other's differences a
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Sustainable economy is one that does not just manage for things. But for how those things are interconnected and interrelated
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to form synergies that enable the continuous cycling of resources
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a
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Sustainable economy is ad materialized economy where innovation is focused on delivering greater functionality
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with ever less material demand
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one that can deliver more services
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with less stuff
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one of the most environmentally destructive
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elements to the linear economic model has been its incentive structure that drives businesses to over produce and
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People to over consume in what has come to be called the consumer society
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The industrial model was based on the mass production of tangible products that were pushed out to
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End-users mass production meant that companies had to sell on mass
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Which gave rise to mass marketing and the creation of a consumer culture that went global with globalization in?
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This product based transactional paradigm. There was a strong divide between the producer and consumer
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around the point of transactions due to the fact that both customer and
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Producer had different incentives and motives that ran largely
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Contrary to each other
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Over the past couple of decades with the rise of information technology has come a new model to value
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delivery called the services economy a
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Services economy is one where the focus is on the service delivered the actual outcomes of a process it
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Is based on the systems delivered functionality instead of the amount of resources consumed in the production of the product
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By shifting the producers revenue stream away from the production of products and focusing it on the delivery of functionality
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Services ation is a powerful approach for breaking the core dynamic driving The Consumerist
00:32:50
Economic model with services ation ownership of the product stays with the producer and it's maintenance
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Likewise remains their responsibility in such a way
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They are scent of eyes to produce less while delivering more functionality
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The end result is an alignment of the interests of the end-user with producer and sustainable outcomes for the overall
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system
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Services are really about access
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The idea that people want access to services instead of simply the ownership of products
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This is why the services economy goes hand in hand with networked information technology
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information technology and online platforms enable us to easily and cheaply
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Coordinate the exchange and temporary usage of resources
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Thus working to make access easier and cheaper than ownership in
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This way extra capacity can be created through more effective
00:33:49
organization instead of actually producing more products a
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sustainable economy would be one that is able to focus its innovation and
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resources not on producing more products but on delivering greater functionality
00:34:03
Through the intelligent coordination of existing resources
00:34:20
A sustainable economy would be one where we manage for the whole lifecycle where systems are adaptable and resilient
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Capable of evolving in response to major changes in the environment
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our economies have
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Co-evolved with the natural environment over centuries and millennia many of our industrial systems are adapted to normal
00:34:43
Operating environments but these normal environmental conditions may not be present in the future
00:34:50
The natural environment is changing in very profound
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unpredictable and most likely
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irreversible ways
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within this context there is a manifest need to shift from systems that are optimized for efficiency within
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Stable and predictable environments to those that have a much greater level of adaptive capacity
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Resilience and are capable of evolving to meet new requirements
00:35:17
Whether we are talking about technology
00:35:19
infrastructure or social institutions the centralized systems of organization
00:35:24
We developed during the industrial age are inherently static
00:35:28
They are built once and then go through a linear lifecycle with limited capacity to renew themselves
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They were not designed to evolve
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The challenge of achieving a sustainable form of development is shifting the emphasis
00:35:42
From discrete one-off products to looking increasingly at how they can evolve through their full lifecycle
00:35:50
this is a fundamental switch in paradigm from designing systems that are inherently degenerative over time to systems that are
00:35:58
inherently
00:36:00
regenerative a
00:36:01
central challenge that sustainability presents today is in developing organizations and technology infrastructure that have built-in
00:36:10
mechanisms to enable the evolution of their overall structure
00:36:15
Sustainable organizations are organizations that can evolve over time
00:36:20
They do not just develop on the micro level of the parts changing
00:36:24
But they are also able to successfully navigate change on the macro level
00:36:29
allowing for the whole system to change
00:36:32
Responding to systemic change requires building evolutionary mechanisms into the fabric of organizations
00:36:40
Unlike our traditional centralized mechanisms for regulation that can respond effectively to relatively small scale changes
00:36:48
Evolution is the only way for a whole system to respond to a macro level change
00:36:55
Evolution is a distributed process. No one is in control or can be in control
00:37:00
It is a process whereby many diverse possible solutions have to be tried before the best solutions can be
00:37:08
identified it is a process that involves both diversity, but also
00:37:13
Interaction between the system and its environment in order to identify the best options
00:37:20
much of our systems of organization are built on a linear model where we try to
00:37:25
Externalize any form of non-linearity as it is inherently
00:37:30
Uncontrollable in the process diversity is dumbed down and pushed outside of the organization
00:37:36
The end result is a short term efficient system
00:37:40
But one that no longer has the diversity and mechanisms for generating overall transformation
00:37:46
Thus resulting in a linear lifecycle and unsustainable
00:37:50
solutions
00:37:52
developing solutions that can endure over several life cycles means
00:37:56
Recognising the need for this evolutionary process and the need for the diversity that few
00:38:23
The challenges presented by the environmental crisis and sustainable development are of a kind that we have not seen before
00:38:31
and we do not currently have
00:38:34
coherent solutions to as
00:38:36
A famous person once said we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them
00:38:44
traditional thinking
00:38:46
institutions and management methods that created the sustainability crisis will not solve it as
00:38:52
such the development of truly sustainable global economy would involve a transformation in the deep structure of
00:39:00
post-industrial economies to exhibit new functional capabilities
00:39:05
One thing is for sure though the development of our socio ecological
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Systems will continue to evolve rapidly in the coming decades
00:39:14
Building this new form of sustainable economy will be a massively disruptive
00:39:19
Transformation and there will be many surprises and pitfalls along the way with many widely divergent outcomes
00:39:27
remaining possible
00:42:08
You
