A number of very smart people, including environmental economists at places like the Gund Institute at UVM, are working on valuation of earth services. There’s even an Annual Report for Earth, Inc., which proposes to map the distribution of such services and allocate shares across the now 7 billion of us. But here’s what I think is missing: financial incentive/return. As motivating as sustainability can be, as necessary as it may be to our survival, what’s in it (in the health of what I’ll call Planet, Inc., that is) for the individual? 

How about tying a new index of planetary health into the performance of such a market as your Root Causes Group proposes? How about enabling a class of small individual investors, at a very large scale, to participate in a model that they can actually impact? What if everyone had a real ‘share’? What potential for reinforcement of sustainable thinking and action at all levels?

Hmmmmm. I guess I’ll have to keep working on this…

Larry Grob
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/larry-grob/2/211/499

Further, I believe that we’re missing a cohesive ‘frame’ for attaching ourselves–as individuals, organizations, institutions, corporations, countries–to the big, interconnected picture of how sustainability (which wraps around climate change) works. There’s plenty of ‘it’ working out there, but it’s very complex and easy to get lost, seemingly overwhelmed by the denial. Whether one’s an activist, business leader, policymaker, scientist, investor, educator–we are all engaged in a web of doing good, pushing the ball up the hill. It’s a map-able web. Potentially both a tool for navigation and back-of-the-mind visualization and framing, if embraced in simplified form. It may be my peculiar bias as a business/science/geography/communications/arts oriented person, but I can see the possibilities. 

Larry Grob
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/larry-grob/2/211/499

Imagine — saving energy through a parent-teenager contract? One of the many great ideas surfaced during this invigorating day.

“The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

“We have a system of national accounting that bears no resemblance to the national accounting whatsoever, for it is not the record of our life at home but the fever chart of our consumption.”

These quotes, in face Meadows’ entire book, is worthwhile reading for anyone thinking about these issues.

Thanks again – and I love what you did with the header and date buttons!
Tammy L.
Moonwell Designs

“Too often, “leaders” — authorities, really, try to define happiness for their followers in terms that meet the leader’s needs or those of the organization but not necessarily those of their followers.”

The key to effective positioning is to think like your audience and approach the messages in terms of their needs. While current leaders, Gen X, the manager and bosses, have been conditioned to see corporate success as motivating in and of itself – work on Saturday and you’ll eventually get a corner office – you are right, people have other needs. Appeal to their sense of balance and happiness. Work/life balance doesn’t seem to exist, especially trying to succeed in the first few years of a job. If success means working longer, harder and sacrificing the present for some future that might crumble by the time we get there, that model doesn’t work for me. I think the current pace of corporate/institutional America is toxic if people want to experience real happiness in the moment or even later. How many people slave their lives away at computers under fluorescent lights and commute hours each day on little sleep only to be let go as soon as a company needs to restructure? Know your audience – leaders, if you want to get people on board with sustainability, think about sustainability as it applies on a personal level.

Thanks for getting me thinking!
@AmandaCrater