Archives for July 2018

We like to find global concepts. Like the Sustainable Development Goals. People, politicians from all over the world meet to discuss problem X and to find a solution. It takes them ages to discuss changes and in the end everyone is disappointed because nothing was reached.

The thing is, it’s impossible to come an understanding across the globe. The understanding of the world is too different. Even two people coming from different cities next to each other can’t agree. Worldviews differ outside your bedroom (sometimes even in it).

Nonetheless, we try to find global solutions. We don’t need global rules and regulations, we need a global intention. 

Sustainability. 

When I ask people about sustainability the answers vary widely. From the idea of long-lasting businesses to maintaining the status quo. 

It’s a concept that is understood differently all over the world and even if people are familiar with the official Brundlandt definition, many disagree. 

I want to make a pledge. 

I believe it’s time to ditch the concept of sustainability and introduce a new concept, which is a lot more tangible and transformative than ‘sustainability’.

And this word is ‘reconnecting’. 

Reconnecting to ourselves, to the human and beyond human world. 

A reconnection to these fundamental aspects lays the path for every thing else. 

It influences how we act with ourselves, others, the land we use, the animals, the plants, the mysterious. 

Reconnecting is focused entirely on the process and not on the goal. Every person on this planet has a sense of what it feels like to connect to someone, or something. It doesn’t need a lot of explanation. It’s universal. 

Recent research shows that it’s our connection to other’s that defines our overall happiness in life. Our connections are the foundation. 

Moreover, within the word reconnect, the complex system we are all part of is represented. The entanglement of each element within the system and to acknowledge this entanglement. A system is not about the single elements in it, but about the relationship between them. 

It’s only logical to think that when you connect to other people, you can’t harm them. 

When you connect to yourself, you take care of your health. 

When you connect to the land, you make sure it’s not being harmed. 

It also involves very direct, concrete actions. To reconnect to my neighbor, to my community, to my city. 

It’s not me, in here, my ego. But me in a system. And since I am part of this system, I can only thrive as much as the system thrives. It’s an interconnection and the basic idea of systems science. 

Conclusion

The term sustainability hasn’t served us in the way we needed. The relation, the connectedness, determines how we life this live on this planet. The term sustainability leaves us empty handed. 

“Modern scientific findings validate the underlying connectedness of all living beings. Insights from complexity theory and systems biology show that the connections between things are frequently more important than the things themselves. Life itself is now understood as a self-organizing, self-regenerating complex that extends like a fractal at ever-increasing scale, from a single cell to the global system of life on Earth.” (Lent, 2018)

 

*Photo by Joel Vodell on Unsplash

When we encounter a person that tells us a new story, we unconsciously ask ourselves three questions:

1. Does that person know what she is talking about?
2. Even if she does, is she trying to trick me?
3. Do I identify with the this person’s values and worldview? 

So let’s assume your best friend believes that you know what you are talking about, she also believes, that you are not going to trick her. But she can’t identify with your worldview. To you, climate change is the most urgent matter of our times and you believe that we need to change our lifestyle in order to get anywhere. Your best friend beliefs, that yes, climate change exists, but if it was that bad, the authorities would have do something about it and changing her personal lifestyle seems senseless to her, as she is only one in many. 

How do you find a bridge between these two opposing ideas?

First of all: people who have a strong opinion about something hardly ever change it. It’s due to our evolutionary process of ‘sticking to something, even if wrong, is better than constantly changing your mind’. 

In the last decades, we came to learn, that we need to debate, that we need arguments and good reasoning in order to win someone over. And yes, we need all this. 

But arguments are not enough. 

Instead of engaging someone in a debate it proofed a lot more effectual to engage someone in a dialogue. 

Here is some of the main differences between debating and dialoguing with your best friend. 

debate	dialogue
assuming there is only one answer	assuming others have pieces to of the answer
competitive	collaborative
about winning	about finding common ground
listening for flaws	listening to understand
defending assumptions	exploring assumptions
pushing your outcome	discovering new possibilities
asymmetries of engagement	seeking constructive process

Conclusion

You won’t convince anyone by arguments. Unless you are able to change someone’s values and worldviews in that very moment, start engaging in a dialogue. It will be a lot more fruitful and your best friend will still like you.

 

*Photo by Bewakoof.com Official on Unsplash 

Complex systems are not deterministic: You can’t predict the future. The same action can have various different outcomes. The earth is such a complex system.

If our action in the world come from an inner state of ego-centrism, superiority and mechanistic thinking, the outcome is perpetuated by this kind of thinking. 

Being friendly to a person because of a free drink, leads to a different relationship than being friendly to a person because of a genuine interest. 

Again and again, we see interventions gone wrong. I once read a story of a foreign aid project in Nigeria, where they build a well so women didn’t have to walk 3 miles to get water. When they did, the women hated it. They loved spending that time together, leaving the village for some time. Real care might have come from actually listening to the needs of people, instead of taking a superior position of “I know what’s good for you”. 

Actions that come from an inner state that is not in-line with the intention of the outcome easily go wrong. Those of us working on outer change need to remember the inner first.

In nature, success is considered if the next 10.000 generations thrive. In order to do that, a species can’t protect her great-great-great-grand daughter, all a species can do at that very moment is to take care of her environment, so her offspring has a place to live. Seeing it this way, life’s success can be measured by how well we take care of our environment.

You can save your best friend from going on a bad date. 

You can save your children from eating brussel sprouts.

You can save the plants in your living room from drying out. 

What you can’t save is the planet. 

It doesn’t need you to save it. 

When you talk about ‘saving the planet’, the sentence implies, rather unconscious than conscious, the following ideas:

1. You imply that you can control the planet, you put yourself in a superior position to the planet. 
2. At the same time, you put yourself in the position of being the hero. All hero journey’s though are focused on one person. You are not going to ‘save the planet’ by yourself. 
3. ‘To save’ is a metaphor that comes from the economic system. You save money. For later. And how many of us are actually good in saving?

Even if species are dying, forests are destroyed, the oceans acidify, and the air pollutes, the planet will recover, once we are gone. Whom we need to save is not the planet, but ourself.