Solutions to sustainability - an organic approach

I get frustrated that the road map is so unclear. Grassroots or top-down? Market or moral? Diplomatic or radical? But then I remember that nature doesn't work like that. We keep trying to turn ourselves, our world, our solutions into a machine. Michael Pollan describes this in "Omnivore's Dilemma" - the reductionist, mechanistic mindset applied to plants and agriculture, as if we could reduce the complexity of an ecosystem, the interrelated roles of microbes, fungi, minerals and plants to a simple formula for growing: N-P-K (at our peril). Where is our formula for solving climate change? There is no blueprint - no road map. We have to grow our solutions the good old fashioned way, with dirt and hard work. And, as any conservation biologist will tell you, there is strength in diversity. Though it's tempting for solutions to compete with each other, there's no way to know which will succeed, so the more the better.

I find this a comfort. I'm graduating with a Masters in a month. My fiance seems to think that must mean I know what I want to do with my life. Ha! But thinking about sustainability solutions as an organic rather than industrial process takes some of the pressure off. I don't have to find the right solution, I just have to find something I'm passionate about, something I enjoy, and go for it. I will cultivate that solution strain, let it grow and evolve - maybe it will help, maybe it won't. There is no way to know. But there is strength in diversity.

And the nice thing about being a human being is that we don't have to wait for our particular solution strain to die to know it won't work; we can learn from our mistakes and improve our strategy before it fails. This is yet another argument for an organic rather than blueprint approach. David Korten (1980) articulates this in "Community Organization and Rural Development: A Learning Process Approach." He notes that organizations capable of learning and changing - those organizations that embrace error and integrate research and evaluation with practice - tend to be more successful than those that design a blueprint at the start of a project and stick with it. So, it doesn't matter if we've got it right from the outset because we can - should - learn and adjust as we go.

Washing dishes the other day, I listened to Senator George Mitchell on the radio. He was reflecting on his successful peace negotiations in Northern Ireland. He noted that throughout the process, the press kept asking him when he would come home, since he'd failed to secure an agreement. And, as he astutely put it, up until the day they signed the peace agreement, he had failed: "we had about 700 days of failure and one day of success." This optimistic interview applies perfectly to climate change. Though we should learn from our mistakes and adjust accordingly, we must also be persistent and maintain hope in the face of seemingly endless failure.

We cannot see the future. We are not omnipotent machinists drawing blueprints for a sustainable world. We must instead mimic nature, drawing on diversity, learning from our mistakes. We must be persistent in the face of perceived failure.

It's a great day for gardening, so let's plant some sustainability solutions and see which bear.