Foundations for Sustainability
Brian D. Fath & Dan Fiscus
Fulbright Distinguished Chair, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Professor, Towson University, Maryland, USA
Senior Research Scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria

Chapter 9: Sustainability: A goal for all
•Your reaction
1)Have we made the case that our current view of discrete life imposes an ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and
‘object’ versus ‘subject’ fragmentation that makes it easier to not see the dependency we have on
the environment and therefore degrade it?
2)
2)Is simply knowing this enough to change our behavior?

Recap
•Life as the primary basis for value
•six founding principles of holistic Life science
•seven Life lessons and methods developed from past work
•described several existing allied works and innovative leaders who are already implementing
technology and applications
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•the systemic environmental degradation we now experience has been caused largely by the dominant
mechanistic root metaphor at the heart of science

•It is not a new discovery that a functioning dialectic—where two sides continually oppose each
other—can be stable particularly when there is balance in ascendency of the two sides.
•The environmental crisis is one manifestation of the asymmetric imbalance toward Transcenders and
away from Sustainers, and toward reductionism away from holism.
•Our book aims to reposition and stimulate the role of Sustainers and holism, but not to eliminate
the opposites.
https://edgecappartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/balance-154516_960_720.png Výsledek obrázku
pro yin yang

Inter-being
•looking into a flower, you can see that the flower is made of many elements that we can call
non-flower elements
–Embodied
–Embedded
–Enfolded
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life–environment =
  {environment{ecosystems{organisms{environment}}}}

Importance of place
•Protection and investment in place
•Finding the balance of what the environment offers: sustaining (and enhancing) those flows
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•Geography of Nowhere

Adaptive cycle – growth, conservation, disruption, reorganization



Key features of success
(entry points)
•Capacity to grow (r)
– * Activation energy
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http://openlandscapes.zalf.de/ImagesWiki/Fig2_adaptive_cycle.jpg
nCapacity to develop (K)
n* Self organized to store information and capital
nCapacity to survive (Ω)
* Improvise to maintain vital functions
nCapacity to renew (α)
* Learn and forgive to reorient

Pathologies in succession
Entry
Exit
r-stage
Poverty trap – no activation energy, no scaling
Overshooting („forever young“), relentless resource acquisition
K-stage
Lack of internal complexity (right buffers, redundancies, connections)
Perpetuation of status quo through cannibalism
Rigidity trap (loss of connection to the outside)
Ω-stage
Subsidize rigid systems
Inability to improvise
α-stage
Self-victimization mentality
Lack of direction (no scale, no new orientor)

Applied to business management



•No organism is separate from its surroundings.
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•Hyperset formulation
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life–environment =
  {environment{ecosystems{organisms{environment}}}}

•“If the landscape has changed since the time your map was made, then by following it you may end
up somewhere you did not intend to go.”
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Change the course
•being prepared and adaptive to changes that inevitably come
•there is a right time to grow, but it is not always

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•There is no way to sustainability;
•sustainability is the way

Discussion questions
•Counter argument – place matters, ours, not yours, role of nativism and tribalism in
Sustainability
•Can you see the overlapping systems balanced across scales?
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Discussion questions
•What does sustainability mean to you?
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•How is that different after reading the book?
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•What things could you do differently now?
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•What could the book do differently?
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