This special issue of Solutions is devoted to the idea of ecosystem services—the benefits humans derive from our shared “natural capital” assets, including everything from climate regulation to water supply to pollination to cultural amenities. The idea that preserving the environment is an asset, rather than an impediment, to economic growth and development is both […]
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Security by Design
It is commonly assumed that our national security depends only on our capacity to project military power beyond our borders and has little to do with how we organize the internal business of the country. The nation’s armed strength and its “soft power” are necessary components of security, but they are not—and cannot be—the whole […]
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Rio and Beyond
This special issue of Solutions celebrates this year’s most important environmental event: the Rio de Janeiro summit on sustainable development in June. Twenty years have passed since the first Earth Summit in 1992, and we need an urgent reevaluation of how our economies depend on our environment. Since 1992, the earth’s population has grown from […]
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Transforming the Design Process to Create Better Solutions
“All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired and foreseeable end constitutes the design process.” —Victor Papanek, The Green Imperative Solutions always arise out of the design process. Any time we conceive a course of […]
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Sustainability, System Thinking, and Envisioning: the Balaton Group Influence
Donella Meadows was renowned for her capacity to envision a sustainable world, and to inspire others to do the same. As she notes in the “Envisioning” section of this issue, a sustainable society isn’t stagnant and authoritarian. She believed a community dedicated to the planet’s health relied on innovation and playfulness focused “on mindfully increasing […]
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Business as a Force for Change in Our World
Every day when we go to work, we have an opportunity—an opportunity to do better, work better, and raise our voices to build better companies. Most companies want to change how they do business in order to change the world. When we are the leaders of those businesses, we not only have an opportunity, we […]
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Sustainability 2.0
Sustainability is dead; long live sustainability. Sustainability has gone “mainstream.” Firms develop sustainability strategies, develop sustainable products and business processes, produce sustainability reports, and appoint chief sustainability officers who tout sustainability as being core to their mission. University administrators promote sustainability as central to their curricula. Scholars pursue sustainability as a field of research inquiry. […]
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Sustainable Well-being
When people think about how to move our societies towards sustainability, they usually think simply about reducing our collective environmental impact. But the related question, of how human well-being can be produced more efficiently, is often ignored. Modern economic systems are disastrously inefficient ways of producing well-being. The vast majority of people in rich countries […]
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Conservation and Profits: Always in Conflict?
Protecting and conserving our natural resources is important now and for future generations. National parks, land-use conservation, and marine reserves all contribute to this effort. The gains that come from conservation are indisputable—often quantified as ecosystem services. This is especially true in terms of the enhanced biodiversity and the long-term sustainability that go with preserving […]
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Full Spectrum Sustainability— Developing Working Models for Community Transformation
Humans are a miraculous example of evolutionary success. Our ability to engage in rational thought, to form cooperative groups, to share information through complex symbols, to make and use sophisticated tools: all of these things have enabled us to spread and flourish. However, at the dawn of the 21st century the features and manifestations of […]