Leadership, Leadership, Leadership

I keep seeing it, hearing it everywhere, this call for leadership.

"Today, more than ever, we need political leaders who can see the big picture, who understand the relationship between the economy and its environmental support systems." –Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

That's the most recent. I'm reading Eco-Economy, Lester's 2001 treatise on the reconciliation required between people and planet. I'm just cracking into it but I suspect I will be largely familiar with the content, that it will echo classic works on the subject that I've read over the past 6 years on this journey towards understanding that magical, elusive idea of sustainability: Marilyn Waring's If Women Counted (1989), E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973), Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). Throw in Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland Report from the 1987 World Conference on Environment and Development. They all say the same thing: we need change, and we need it now. And we need leaders to bring about change. Leaders galvanize people, they energize them, they paint a picture of what's possible. Some say leaders are born, not made, but I think that misses a social and ecological reality: If you don't water the plant or nourish the person, they will not grow. I believe leadership is cultivated and developed, and that a truly healthy society is one which nourishes every single person to become a leader in their own right, bravely following their own path, forging ahead, helping others, confident, grounded, enthusiastic.

So where does this support come from? Well, you find a lot of emphasis on leadership in business school. Business schools have institutes dedicated to the development of leadership qualities, towards creating strong teams that have the ability to work together to... what? Generally, to rape the planet and exploit others. Bold terminology I know, but at this point, let's not kid ourselves about the modus operandi of capitalism as widely practiced. Yes, there is an emerging consciousness that is challenging the business-as-usual mindset of margin maximization, externalization, and single-bottom-line balance books. But it has yet to crack the code that guides the practices of every major corporation in the world and the governments that regulate society to allow them to continue 'doing business'. Generally, it's the Arts & Sciences and the Humanities that churn out the revolutionaries, the people analysing the underlying structures and philosophies that maintain the system as is. That's where you'll find the analysis, the morality, the bigger picture thinking... but it's not, generally, where you'll find the leadership development, the team building, the executive authority and surety of purpose that allows business people to just get so much done. And engineers? Don't get me started about engineers. My brother is one, and I've gotten to know a few others. At Concordia, my alma mater, Sustainable Development constituted half of a course - 1.5 credits. And, talking to the few engineers I knew that were concerned with the health and future of the planet, most engineers didn't take it seriously. It was a bird course.

Carl Sagan has a great quote: "Nothing else is going to matter if you can't breathe the air or drink the water. Don't just sit this one out. Do something." I come back to that again and again. No awards, no salary, no accomplishment is going to matter if you can't live. If that was taught at the beginning of every single class in every single discipline, perhaps we would see a better world emerging out of those institutions of higher learning.

David Orr has a good follow up: "Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare. The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity. It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs." It comes from a landmark essay called What is Education For?

So how do we blend the best of both worlds? How do we take all the good stuff from each faculty and discipline and blend it together to come up with a generation of individuals who can address the challenge of radically changing our entire civilization pronto, in the timeframe our scientific and moral authorities (few and besieged though they are) are calling for? Mark Taylor, Dean of Religious Studies at Columbia University, put it eloquently in an Op-Ed he wrote in April last year, calling for us to End the University as We Know It, and to bring people around a table to tackle the issues the world is facing, rather than writing useless theses documents on ever more obscure theories and topics for professors only concerned with their tenure-track status and the number of published, peer-reviewed works. Yes, it is time to get down to business and take care of these myriad, inter-connected social, environmental and economic crises currently threatening to undo us from every angle. (On a side note, I think there are quite possible benefits to the global south from the dissolution of the northern global economic hegemony, but I want to save that for another post, which will also focus on the film 2012).

So, we need leaders to help us transition. They need to come from different disciplines, sharing skills, approaches, and understandings. And we need them now. Yet try to find funding for leadership development programs and institutes and you find foundations are all hanging the same sign on their doors: "Closed for the recession. Sorry." The metaphor I've come up with is this: There is a space ship with a limited amount of fuel which needs to get back to Earth. The space ship requires a certain amount of momentum in order to break through the atmosphere. Yet the pilots are slowing down to conserve fuel. What if the current value systems continue to denigrate such that financial wealth, as represented by stock investments, dwindles more and more, so that the 'spending power' of the foundations' endowments shrinks and shrinks? Why not use that power now? In his brilliant and concise 'Powerdown' Richard Heinberg warned of the importance of using the remaining oil wealth on earth to organize and implement the transition to sustainability, rather than just burning it up in a blaze of fire. But is anyone in a position of power anywhere on Earth proposing such a program?

We know there are fundamental changes that need to be made to our economic system, changes in what we value and how. These foundations fund the scientists and policy analysts that tell us this. We need a transition strategy to go from this system to a sustainable one. If we don't employ the resources of the current system to transition to the next one we anticipate some kind of disaster. That is the anxiety we feel right now. Foundations should be giving it their all right now to catalyse this massive transformation, but instead they are playing by the same rules of the system their funding recipients decry. As if there is going to be a world needing funding for research activities if there is no food, water or oxygen! Leadership development is a supposed priority, but where are the resources, programs and support to do so? Answer me that McConnell, Metcalfe, Gordon, Packard, Gates...