Thinking Like a Mountain

Most environmentalists are familiar with Aldo Leopold’s evocative metaphor “thinking like a mountain.”³ Leopold was concerned that when we focus just on the relations between a few parts of an ecosystem, we often fail to understand the complex interactions that make the system work. In an iconic story, he describes learning this lesson after trying to increase deer herds by killing off wolves. The deer herds did grow, but as a result they exceeded the carrying capacity of the land, browsing all edible vegetation until they died of starvation. Thinking like a mountain involves understanding the land as a community or system, whose members play important roles in its functioning.

To understand systems-thinking skills, it helps to have some theoretical vocabulary; in this respect these skills differ from the others we have explored. The theory of complex adaptive systems provides a general description of how self-organizing systems like ecosystems, organizations, and political bodies function. Such systems “involve many components that adapt or learn as they interact.”⁴ They have emergent properties that cannot be understood in terms of properties of their components. Linear causal relations between their parts cannot fully explain their behavior; complex feedback loops play an important role in systems functioning. Many complex adaptive systems are self-organizing, which means that they function in ways that preserve and often enhance their own functioning rather than succumbing to increased entropy over time.

Such systems concepts are common in some disciplines, but the associated skills for thinking about systems are rarely taught in any depth. My discussion will focus on the skills, but only by providing enough detail that a reader can understand the reasons for thinking that we all need to strengthen these skills in order to flourish now. Several excellent overviews of systems thinking are already available.⁵ Small-scale systems like families, work environments, and local ecosystems are where most people can learn to apply systems thinking to make change, so I will illustrate the skills with such examples. The next five sections identify specific systems skills.

Feedback Analysis Skills

As we refine the above skills of system description, we need to build our capacity to identify the feedback loops that govern system functioning. Kastens and colleagues put the point succinctly: “Because feedback loops underpin a stable Earth system, fostering a working knowledge of this concept throughout the decision-making populace could increase civilization’s capacity to cope with 21st-century challenges.”⁹

Some feedbacks help to maintain an equilibrium in the system. When a system moves outside of an equilibrium state, then a sensor triggers a sequence of events that returns the system toward equilibrium. A thermostat or a car’s cruise control exhibits this kind of “balancing” feedback loop. Often the results of balancing feedback are desirable; our body sweats when overheated to reduce heat through evaporation and to return the body to its equilibrium temperature. However, sometimes balancing feedbacks preserve a system in an undesirable state. In Mandy’s co-op, the difficultly of keeping a broad inventory of products when revenue is low may cause people to shop elsewhere, which keeps the system in a low-revenue state. The board must find a mechanism for leveraging change in the system that will move it out of this negative equilibrium. Ecosystems overwhelmed by an invasive species face similar challenges. We need to break the feedback to leverage change in the system.

Other “reinforcing” feedback loops are important for system growth. Here the feedback accelerates system change in either a positive or negative direction when the output of a process feeds back into the process, further amplifying output. In other words, reinforcing feedbacks create either virtuous or vicious cycles. In the case of Mandy’s co-op, the board is trying to find an intervention that will not only build short-term growth in revenue but will start a cycle in which each new growth stimulates further growth. Jim Collins calls this “the flywheel,” which is difficult to get moving, but once it is moving with some speed, it continues to accelerate because of its own momentum.¹⁰ He argues that businesses that create and patiently nurture a flywheel can become great. Apple might be a current example, with its increasingly sophisticated versions of the iPhone. Vicious reinforcing feedbacks are particularly troubling because they can lead to system collapse if they are not stopped. Climate change involves numerous vicious cycles. For example, as permafrost melts because of increased air temperatures, it releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which further increases temperatures, releasing more methane, and so on.

Often feedbacks have delays between the input and the output of a feedback loop. For example, if Mandy’s starts advertising sales for products to increase revenue, it may take months before we can tell whether the input has the desired effect. The delays that characterize our climate system, as well as its scale and the huge number of actors, make it hard for us to see the effects of our behavior. One way of intervening in a system is to try to shorten delays in feedbacks that govern the information we receive from behavioral inputs. This can shift behavior much more reliably than delayed information.

We need to become much better at determining where reinforcing and balancing feedback loops are influencing system behaviors and at learning how to shift feedbacks. Simple feedbacks are often easy to see, but in complex systems, feedbacks may interact in ways that mask their characteristic behaviors and make them hard to identify. System modelers create diagrams that highlight causal relations between key system components, including feedbacks; see figure 4 for a simple model illustrating the dynamics of the homeless population in response to various interventions. We do not necessarily need to learn how to create such diagrams, but we do need to learn how to see feedbacks in the systems that affect us.

Integrating Systems Skills with Individualism

In prior chapters, we saw that strong cultural norms reinforcing clusters of skillful habits often make it hard to acquire contrasting skill sets. Our individualist norms have the same impact on systems skills. The tensions between pursuit of individual self-interest and common goods are a regular part of political debate, as they should be. The tensions between systems thinking and methodological individualism are less salient but still quite powerful.

According to methodological individualism, group behavior is reducible to the behavior of individuals, and we can understand the former in terms of the latter. The skills reinforced by methodological individualism and other forms of reductionism in biology and chemistry include isolating the effects of key variables and testing for correlations with other variables. On this paradigm, if we understand lawlike relations between parts of a system, then we should be able to predict the behavior of the whole system. The contrasting holist view holds that at least some group phenomena can only be understood at the level of the whole system.

The skills of reductive explanation have enabled us to understand and manipulate many physical systems reliably, hence this approach has become almost definitive of science. Its success has been more limited in social systems and ecosystems, where holism has a foothold.¹⁶ While most non-scientists do not think much about reductionism, they are still influenced by the idea that we should be able to find the cause of some event. Our individualistic cultural emphasis strengthens a tendency to look for simple causes of complex events, which is manifested in the desire to find someone to blame for complex failures like the Exxon Valdez disaster. It also encourages us to address our problems by trying to manipulate salient parts of a system that are taken to be primarily responsible for the problem, instead of finding ways to leverage change in the dynamics of the whole system.

We need norms that positively reinforce both reductionist skills and systems skills. We need to develop the binocular vision that enables us to integrate the use of these skills and to use both explanatory paradigms productively. This gives us a richer, more nuanced picture of the world and a larger toolbox for addressing our challenges. In allocating blame for the Exxon Valdez oil spill, we may apply our systems-thinking skills to try to understand how the interactions of a large number of factors contributed to the failure. Doing so can help all of us support ways of leveraging change in the system to reduce such disasters. While individualistic skills used to find fault and determine just penalties satisfy a demand for a quick, comprehensible moral response, the systems skills temper such judgments. Binocular vision should also enable the careful crafting of associations that effectively integrate pursuit of self-interest and the common good. As Tocqueville observed almost two hundred years ago, Americans were once very good at building associations that served the interests of the community and the self.

While people with quite diverse viewpoints should acknowledge the importance of this kind of binocular vision, they will differ about where to set the balance point between the contrasting skill sets. Since systems skills are generally underdeveloped, we certainly need to shift the balance point toward them. In the next section, we will see strong reasons for thinking that a habitual use of systems skills will enhance our chances of flourishing—another reason to think the balance needs to be tilted in their direction.

Systems Thinking and Flourishing

Systems skills seem so abstract that it may be helpful to begin this section with a story of how they enhanced my own flourishing. I grew up as a dedicated individualist, inclined both toward pursuing self-interest and toward linear, reductive thinking. Like many in my generation, I flirted with communal living, but I never really experienced a strong sense of community until my first teaching job at a small liberal arts college, where the common good was a central theme. I fell in love with being part of a small, manageable, shared enterprise—a human-scaled community, and I learned how the college functioned.

The opportunities that came my way at a small place developed my leadership skills and also my understanding of higher education systems. Soon after tenure, I chaired the college honors program and then the general education program. The college struggled; we had to make difficult decisions. All of the faculty saw the budgets, and the consequences of poor decisions. We knew viscerally the importance of student recruitment and retention. Without knowing any of the terminology of systems thinking, I began to see how some departments had created positive feedback loops that generated high enrollments, while others languished. I experimented with ways to build such feedbacks in the philosophy department, with mixed success. While the mistakes were unpleasant, I learned as much from them as from the successes.

Fast forward to mid-career after my move to Green Mountain College. Here I focused on teaching in environmental studies and did some program administration. Such leadership roles did little to erode my love of the individual freedoms associated with being a faculty member, but they did shift my balance between individualist and systems skills toward the latter. With great reluctance, when no other options seemed feasible, I agreed to become provost (for a year or two) during a difficult presidential transition. Twelve years later, after serving three presidents, I joyfully returned to the faculty, but I knew I would miss much of a job I had come to enjoy. Having that level of responsibility for the welfare of a community significantly strengthened my systems skills.

I saw my job as facilitating and strengthening achievement of common goods at the school, including the education of all students and the growth of the school. Achieving these goals called on a wide range of social skills to help individuals overcome competing self-interests in order to work effectively together. We needed to craft a high-functioning community with few resources other than our students’ tuition. Systems skills provided the framework and analytical tools that helped me create strategic interventions and communicate why we needed to change. Here, analyzing how the college’s performance was affected by systems at larger and smaller scales was extremely helpful both in planning and communication. Larger-scale forces like economic downturns, demographic changes, and accreditors’ mandates had to be anticipated and effectively navigated. Dysfunction among subsystems had to be mitigated. Shifting problematic feedback loops and developing feedbacks that reinforced effective problem-solving now became existentially important. In the end, it seemed that my most important role was motivating the development of beneficial cultural norms.

But even if I enjoyed the trajectory of my growing repertoire of skills, did it really enhance my flourishing? Despite the increasing stress of more responsibility, the longer work hours, the inevitable failures, I am confident that it did. Honing my systems skills made me happier in my position and better at it. It also made me feel like a better human being. I felt a greater sense of contribution to the common good and more appreciation for what that involves. I felt more competent and confident about navigating the challenges we faced even as I become more sensitive to manifold uncertainties. I was able to adjust my expectations in light of understanding larger-scale system impacts on the college, which reduced disappointments. I became more nuanced in my assessments, less angry, and more caring. I can honestly say that the imperfect and still changing binocular vision I have found has enhanced each of the elements of flourishing described in the introduction, especially positive relationships, meaning, and a sense that my skills were reasonably aligned with the challenges I faced.

The college grew by 40 percent over the first six years I was provost, then it plateaued for a few years before beginning to shrink. It also attained a national reputation for sustainability education, appearing in top ten colleges for sustainability lists from Sierra magazine and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education—surprising achievements for a small rural experimental college. Alas, five years after I stepped down as provost, the college closed its doors, unable to attract enough students or raise enough money to continue operations. I experienced at Green Mountain a large part of the adaptive cycle, writ small—a heady growth phase, a short difficult conservation phase, and then the pain of release. Through it all, the systems skills tempered any tendencies toward hubris and increased my resilience. One silver lining of the college’s decline is that I am better equipped now to navigate the turbulence of our times.

The details of this story are mine, but the lessons it contains about practicing systems skills and flourishing are transferable. First, we need to practice these skills on a regular basis in a setting where we can make mistakes and learn from them. We can focus on something we do regularly—for me teaching a course or playing a leadership role—and see how systems skills can help us to do it better and enjoy it more. Second, we should accept some responsibility for leadership even if we do not feel prepared for it. Having some responsibility for how part of a system functions is one of the best ways to deepen our understanding of system dynamics and to experiment with leveraging change. It also deepens the meaning of what we do and at least sometimes provides a sense of achievement. And third, we should work toward being a part of a community whose culture supports a balance between individualist and systems skills. I tell graduates looking for a job or a graduate school to look at the culture of an organization. Will it help to reinforce the skills you want to improve? I was fortunate in this respect.

A story can be illustrative, but we also need general reasons for thinking that systems skills will strengthen our flourishing in the age of climate change. The first of these reasons we have already anticipated; our position on the adaptive cycle calls for greater use of systems skills. The threats associated with planetary boundaries are best characterized in systems language, as are many regional issues like systemic racism and income inequality. Our individualistic cognitive habits make it very difficult for us to intuitively grasp complex socio-ecological systems. As a result, we tend to delay action on our challenges, both because of uncertainty and because our individualistic assumptions often conflict with promising solutions. Such wicked problems have a social dimension, so they are rarely amenable to reductionist, linear problem-solving. To leverage change in most socially complex problems we need to understand the system dynamics that lead to the problem, the likely impacts of interventions, including their potential unintended consequences, and ways that the system we wish to alter interreacts with systems at larger and smaller scales. Solutions to such problems require collaboration among stakeholders, integration of multiple kinds of expertise, and a high tolerance for uncertainty in decision-making.

Furthermore, since we are likely to experience serious release on multiple scales, we need the skills that enable us to successfully navigate the back loop of the adaptive cycle. We have seen that when approaching a release, people experience heightened uncertainty and conflict. Unless release is a result of a large-scale disaster, like a catastrophic flood or a devastating military attack, people will be uncertain about whether the system identity can be preserved. Sometimes release involves a long, unpleasant descent before the system becomes nonviable, which makes it very hard to know whether to hold out for help, prepare for major change, or just to leave. Anyone who has been part of an organization in decline has felt such uncertainty.

Once in release, people will be unsure of whom to trust once established leaders have failed to guide the ship to port. Systems skills help to clarify what is happening and highlight productive options for action. We can expect a great deal more turbulence in our lives as we try to skirt planetary boundaries and navigate local releases. In this context we must prepare for many “mini-releases”—shifts in careers, geographical context, close relationships, and friend groups. Those who have prepared for release physically and psychologically will be better able to face the uncertainty it occasions and to adapt. They will also be able to make better personal decisions about what changes in their own lives may be warranted. They will have a stronger sense of agency.

A second line of argument establishes that we have swung too far toward individualism to flourish culturally and that we need to counterbalance that with a reemphasis on systems thinking, especially common-good skills. Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s excellent book, Upswing, details this reasoning by tracing the shifting social balances we have tried to strike between individualism and community in the United States.¹⁷ They begin with the question of why problems like polarization, economic inequality, and social isolation seem to be consistently getting worse. Their answer is that since the 1960s we have gradually become more and more individualistic, emphasizing personal freedom, individual rights, and self-expression at the expense of pulling together to work toward the common good. The book is an extended, data-rich defense of the thesis that from the 1880s to the present, the US culture is characterized by an “I—We—I” trajectory.

Their historical narrative begins with the Gilded Age of the 1890s, when severe economic inequality, horrendous working conditions, and open class warfare were defended by the individualism fostered by social Darwinism. In reaction, the Progressive movement arose, which emphasized working together for the common good, transforming social norms, and building effective associations. Thus began a growing emphasis on community, which supported the New Deal, massive mobilization during World Wars I and II, and major infrastructure improvements. It also led eventually to the oppressive conformity that many young people rebelled against in the 1950s and ’60s. Since then, they argue, individualism has again been on the rise until the present day, as evidenced by survey results, economic data, and a wealth of other data sources.¹⁸

Although our current form of individualism has enhanced many freedoms, its costs have been considerable in terms of social stability and shared problem-solving. The US response to the COVID-19 pandemic can be fruitfully viewed as reflecting an overemphasis on individualism. Stemming the spread of the virus was a classical collective-action problem. Individuals could contribute to the goal, but addressing the problem successfully required unified action. Since individuals capable of spreading the disease were often asymptomatic, there needed to be widespread testing to reduce the spread. But initially the federal government resisted setting up a testing program, on the grounds that this was the responsibility of states, which at the time were not well positioned to marshal the resources necessary for widespread testing. In various other areas crucial to life, such as clean water and clean air, and defense against enemies, it is the nation state that assumes responsibility for promoting common goods.

At the beginning of the pandemic, leaders emphasized the technical problem of rapidly creating a vaccine for the disease. We excel at solving that kind of problem and succeeded admirably. But the pandemic involved complex social dynamics. Variations in our trust in government, our tolerance for risk, our willingness to shift behaviors and to be vaccinated, made it very difficult to manage the pandemic, especially given the early uncertainty about what kind of management was best and the fragmentation of the public information system. Our emphasis on personal freedom compromised government attempts to create widespread norms that would mitigate the pandemic, leading some to defend significant constraints of freedom (e.g., lockdowns) to promote the common good of public health. This resulted in backlash and significant politicization of pandemic responses. These dynamics partially explain why the US had significantly more deaths per capita from the pandemic than other highly developed nations. We need to be better at addressing collective-action problems at larger scales, and systems skills will help with that.

Putnam and Garrett conclude that once we see the shifting balance between individualism and the common good, we can learn how to become more community-focused by acting on lessons from the Progressive Era. They suggest we need large-scale political change, which requires building coalitions and emphasizes incremental progress over revolution. We need to avoid overcorrection, and we should seek to find ways in which self-interest and common good align.

A third reason for cultivating systems skills highlights the importance of having different kinds of tools in our problem-solving toolbox. Abraham Kaplan coined what he called the “law of the instrument,” which states that scientists tend to frame problems in ways that fit the methods or instruments that they have ready to hand. If reductionist methodologies are our primary approach to scientific explanation, then we are likely to use them even where they are less apt, as in addressing wicked problems. This approach creates a serious cognitive bias if we have a narrow set of methodologies. Abraham Maslow and many others popularized this “law” with the adage “If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.” While we are limited in how many methodological skills we can effectively marshal, it seems wise to supplement our reductionist skills set with systems-thinking skills that approach such problems in fundamentally different ways. This applies not just to scientists but to the culture at large, which must support alternative ways of looking at complex problems. If a culture has diverse toolboxes, it is likelier to be more flexible and creative in its problem framing, which we sorely need in the age of climate change. This applies to individuals as well as cultures.

Lastly, systems skills strongly reinforce the other resilience skills clusters we need to flourish now. We have seen that the complexity of the systems we are trying to shift requires strong collaborative skills and diverse perspectives. This complexity also plays a key role in justifying greater use of humility skills, increasing our open-mindedness about solutions, and decreasing our development of hard convictions that make compromise impossible. Use of systems skills enables us to construct a more vivid picture of our situation on the edge of release that reinforces development of frugality skills to mitigate the unjust impact of overconsumption on other humans and the biota. Systems thinking is the linchpin for navigating our times. These skills enable us to build an empirically grounded understanding of the dynamics of the age of climate change. This serves as a foundation on which the cultivation of other underappreciated skills can be more easily motivated.

Sustainability, Resilience Skills, and Widespread Flourishing

Up to this point my argument has focused on how individuals can maximize their chances of flourishing no matter what happens. Let’s turn now toward the other half of the argument—the reasons for thinking that if enough people cultivate resilience skillful habits, then our chances of achieving sustainability increase dramatically, which promises to spread flourishing much more broadly. With systems skills in view, we can now look more closely at what sustainability is and how it connects to flourishing.

By one dated count, over three hundred concepts of sustainability have been advanced.¹⁹ Some experts despair over this proliferation and suggest that sustainability has come to include everything good and therefore means nothing specific. Thus, some advocates argue that we need more precise definitions of sustainability in order for the goal to provide a clear guide for action.²⁰ Discussions often begin with the Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development—“meeting the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”—but they quickly move to greater precision. To operationalize this definition, we need to know what kinds of needs are at issue, what counts as compromising others’ needs, and what tradeoffs between needs are permissible. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2015) codify the range-of-goals problems that sustainability attempts to address, but they do not settle debates about what sustainability is.

The concept of sustainability has both a descriptive component and an evaluative component; it is a thick evaluative concept similar to “organic,” “natural,” “cowardly,” and “selfish.”²¹ Such concepts are used to pick out some attribute in the world that can be empirically identified, and they carry a positive or negative value. Both the descriptive and evaluative parts of the concept are essential to its meaning. So, for example, if I say that someone is selfish, I am describing a character trait that is expressed by frequent pursuit of self-interest and I am implying that the trait is morally bad. I would use a different word if I did not think the self-interest was bad. Similarly, “sustainable” usually implies both that some elements of the system can be continued over a period of time and that this is good. In contrast to a thick evaluative concept, a thin evaluative concept, like “good” or “right,” has very little descriptive content; it is almost all evaluative. A purely descriptive concept, like being six meters long, has no evaluative content.

While thick concepts are very useful, they can also create significant confusion. People may align their descriptive and normative content in different ways; what one person thinks of as selfish, another person may think is just rational. They may agree on the facts about someone’s self-interest but disagree about whether it is bad or good. Similar things happen with sustainability. Some debates about sustainability are about empirical questions that can be answered by the sciences. Can some activity be continued into the future, given our resources? Or they may be about values. People may disagree about whether it is good or bad that the activity cannot be continued, even though they agree about all the facts. These sources of ambiguity limit the precision of sustainability, but they also make it well suited to characterizing goals that will motivate people.

We can minimize the ambiguity by specifying in general terms what makes a community sustainable. As is common, I understand “sustainability” to address social and economic issues as well as environmental issues. It is not just environmentalism in new clothes. If we use the systems concepts of social, natural, and economic “stocks of capital,” we can say that actions reducing a stock of capital below a level that enables a community to retain its functioning and regenerate its stocks are unsustainable. Those that maintain or increase stocks and aid a community’s functioning over a timeframe are sustainable for that timeframe.

A couple of examples can help to clarify this abstract idea. The community of Poultney, Vermont, depends on community wells for its drinking water. Any practice of community members that degrades the water coming from those wells in ways that prevent them from supplying clean water to residents compromises the community’s sustainability. Likewise, there is an average degree of trust in the town’s governance institutions among community members. Practices that degrade that trust too much and make the town ungovernable compromise its sustainability.

This simple model must be modified in at least three ways if it is to capture well the core idea of sustainability. First, sometimes one can reduce one stock in ways that affect functioning in order to increase another stock. For example, the town can take on debt to upgrade the wells so they provide adequate water. The debt may increase risks to financial sustainability over a certain period but in the long run strengthen overall sustainability. Sustainability depends in part on how the stocks of capital interact to sustain the functioning of the whole community. Second, a community’s functioning may degrade stocks of other communities while preserving its own, which we will want to say is unsustainable. If Poultney were to dump its sewage into the nearby river, downstream water quality (natural capital) would be degraded. So, we must add that if a community’s practices degrade the stocks of other communities in ways that diminish their functioning, then those practices are unsustainable.

The third modification pertains to the impacts that a community’s practices would have if other communities acted similarly. Sometimes a community’s practices do little to degrade the stocks of capital available for other communities, but that is because others are not acting in the same way. For example, a community might emit pollutants into the atmosphere (like CO₂) that by themselves do not diminish the functioning of the other communities not emitting such pollutants in the same quantity. But if all communities emitted the same amount of pollutants, then the atmosphere of all would be seriously degraded. In effect, we cannot universalize the behavior of the emitting community. This is why even in the early twentieth century, developed nations’ CO₂ emissions were unsustainable. Rich countries could get away with increasing carbon emissions only because poor countries had lower emissions. Of course, now the atmosphere is already degraded, and everyone is paying a penalty, though in unequal ways. It seems reasonable to say that if a community cannot universalize its practices, then it is acting unsustainably.

The picture that emerges from using this model is a nested set of communities, from a few people in a place to bioregions, national communities, and finally to the global community. At each scale we can look at how the dynamics of the community affect its own and others’ capital stocks and also how practices at larger and smaller scales are affecting the community we are interested in (our “focal” community). If the stocks of capital are high enough to permit continuing regeneration, and they are not decreasing, then the community is relatively sustainable in the absence of negative impacts from the larger-scale systems in which it is embedded. To put this account formally:

Community C is sustainable during a period t if:

1. the stocks of natural, social, human, and financial capital within C’s control are stable or increasing over t;
2. continuing the activities of members of C for multiple generations beyond t will likely further maintain or increase each of these stocks; and
3. during t, C achieves a level of impact on each of these stocks such that if everyone had that impact during t, human society would have the capabilities to thrive for multiple human generations within the carrying capacity of the planet (all else being equal).

So far, this broad account of sustainability leaves open some important questions. What is the relation between sustainability and other important social goals like justice? Does sustainability require transformation of central aspects of our current system, such as global capitalism, or does it preserve most of our current system while avoiding crossing key thresholds? A virtue of the model I have sketched is that it allows for different answers to such questions while engaging people in a continuing search for more refined visions of sustainability. Still, I do need to provide my own tentative answers to such questions so the picture of sustainability has more detail.

It is tempting to see sustainability as an overarching goal, which includes addressing poverty, racial injustice, and income inequality, as well as avoiding planetary boundaries. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are broad enough to suggest this view. The argument that most negative features of our society degrade the stocks of social, economic, or ecological capital seems to justify this position. Yet there are some strong reasons for highlighting the tensions between goals like sustainability and social justice by identifying them separately. The Brundtland definition of sustainable development with which we started seems to emphasize justice for future generations, but this can be in tension with advancing justice now for current peoples. For example, communities in the Global South may need to burn their easily accessible fossil fuels in order to develop their economies in the absence of a great deal more aid from the Global North. It is not enough to say that all present people can meet their needs, when there are gross inequities in standards of living.

Julian Agyeman has been a powerful advocate for “just sustainabilities,” a view that explicitly combines social justice and sustainability.²² He argues that sustainability, as it is commonly interpreted, is an incomplete guide to community goal setting; we must highlight justice. He agrees that without achieving social justice goals, genuine sustainability cannot be reached; but unfortunately many in the sustainability community emphasize the environmental portions of sustainability and downplay justice. Agyeman’s examples focus on eliminating food deserts, creating healthy human habitats in which vibrant urban neighborhoods support good jobs, and democratizing streetscapes so they serve everyone, not just those with access to cars. In just sustainabilities, such goals are as important as species preservation and carbon emissions reductions, and sometimes they need to take priority. Similarly, Scott Campbell argues it is important to highlight the tensions that urban planners encounter between stakeholders focused on social justice and on sustainability, rather than to pursue a premature synthesis of these goals.²³ I concur that it is best now for pragmatic reasons to see such goals as distinct though intertwined.

The second question—how much transformation, if any, sustainability requires—involves speculation that often reflects ideology more than empirical evidence. Many people pursue a vision of sustainability in which we appear to be trying to extend the conservation phase of modern postindustrial global capitalism and the lifestyles that it enables for the well-off while raising others toward such lifestyles. This vision is supported by the pursuit of technological fixes for planetary limits, such as renewable energy, carbon capture, genetic preservation of species, large-scale ecological restoration, and high-yield genetically engineered crops.

An alternative vision of sustainability sees our system and the lifestyles it enables as the causes of unsustainability and thus insists that we need to transform the identity of this system and reorganize in a more sustainable pattern.²⁴ The transition-town movement is a well-known example of the latter view, featuring major shifts in energy use and lifestyle leading to relocalization, re-skilling people, and more participatory governance.²⁵ In the debate about how much change is necessary for sustainability, I lean toward the transformational view. But of course, we cannot know in any detail which elements of the system can be preserved in the process and what should be lost amid reorganization. We can be pretty sure that sustainability will require fundamental changes in energy use, but we cannot be sure whether use of personal vehicles will decrease along with fossil fuel use or whether electric vehicles will enable a more sustainable world that retains the freedom of the road.

The either/or implication of the transformation-or-conservation question is misleading. Sustainability will inevitably require some adaptive cycles on many scales to enter release and reorganization, leading to changes that lose elements of our identity we would prefer to keep. But unless we enter major collapse socially, our progress toward sustainability will preserve many parts of our systems that are important to us. Thus, key elements of our identity will be conserved. Some sustainability advocates want the system to crash down and be replaced, and others want much of it to be preserved, but sustainability itself does not require either. Much depends on what behaviors we are willing to change on a large scale and what innovations—technological or political—we can develop fast enough. And there is much value in the opposing visions competing for our allegiance as the future unfolds.

The case for thinking that just sustainability spreads flourishing should be fairly evident by now. If on large scales we do approach net positive impact on social, environmental, and economic stocks and ensuring they are at a level sufficient for system functioning, then on these scales the following are likely to be true: We will have limited our risk of crossing major planetary boundaries and suffering the chaos that comes with the release that would have followed. We will have developed governance norms than enable us to manage much conflict and work toward solutions to our challenges on multiple scales. Trust in institutions and between people with different views will be on the rise. We will have preserved enough species and well-functioning ecosystems that we have the ecological services on which we depend. We will have alleviated much poverty and made systemic progress toward just treatment of present and future peoples. A critical mass of people will believe that they are prepared to effectively navigate the dynamics of their times and contribute to the progress communities seem to be making. This list could be much longer, but this is enough to show why under such conditions, a great deal more people would be able to flourish. Most systemic barriers to flourishing would be diminished.

The above list is also tailored to echo points in the last four chapters that link skillful habits to addressing our challenges and grasping the opportunities that lie therein. Widely embraced frugality skills would contribute significantly to reducing negative ecological impacts and reducing unjust distribution of resources. Collaborative and humility skills will be crucial for reducing conflict and crafting governance that can address our challenges. Empathy skills would sensitize us to the plights of less fortunate peoples and other organisms. Systems skills would help us productively address our challenges and navigate the turbulence that is an inevitable concomitant of where we are on large-scale adaptive cycles.

The sheer number, scale, and complexity of the challenges we need to surmount to approach sustainability are daunting. As noted earlier, if these challenges are addressed one at a time, we will almost certainly fail to meet many of them. Sustainability requires us to look for key leverage points that enable us to address many challenges at once. We must find an approach that enables actions to be unified, easy to communicate, practical for ordinary people, and focused on addressing root causes, rather than symptoms. In the next two chapters, I will explain why cultivating resilience skillful habits is a particularly promising leverage point and how we might accomplish that through education broadly understood. By ourselves, most of us can do little to change our culture’s trajectory to create a smoother and more rapid transition toward sustainability. But we can participate in social movements that promote such goals.