Or text "Haiti" to 90999 on your cell phone or Blackberry and $10 will be donated to the Red Cross and go toward the life-saving efforts for the people of Haiti.
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These projects span across the world from Arviat, Nunavut to Islamabad, Pakistan.
Here’s what they're about:
1) Global Sustainability Inventory (GSI): This project seeks to seeks to characterize the global citizen from the sustainable future. It has both immediate and short-term applicability. In the short-term the GSI can be used to develop current leadership for sustainability (this includes leadership in corporate social responsibility). In the long term it provides goals for learning, both personal and social development goals.
2) The Pakistan Water and Sustainable development Initiative (PWSDI): This project seeks to connect corporate culture in Finland with their supply chain partners in China in a collaborative effort to help develop a water/sustainability Information and Communication Technology (ICT) research project in beta-test sites with collaborators in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi, Pakistan. We have interest from water knowledge experts in Holland and green chemistry experts from US colleges and industry.
While both of these projects are currently in development, we will strive to put them into action in 2010!
EJ Wensing
Ecosphere Net
GSI Research Project Canada/USA
Pakistan Water and Sustainable Development Initiative
]]>From Nunavut to Nijmegen, Australia to Arizona people around the world like what we are doing and want to help us succeed.
We would like to wish everyone a Happy 2010 New Year!
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
]]>The first is globalization. Many have justifiably wrangled with the idea of globalization because initially it has been about multinational corporations seeking a global monopoly for market control. More recently, however, a new vision of globalization is emerging. This is one of collaborative networks connecting the local to the global and, yes, including corporations, but also many other stakeholders.
The second is socialism. This has been something particularly apparent in the media over the last year in the United States. Many people fear socialism and its "ugly cousin" liberalism. Yet there are many models around the world where versions of these two have a functional role in societies, in particular, with regard to generating a sustainable society. Wholly unregulated markets and ideas of infinite growth do not and cannot work in a transition toward sustainable development.
What do tomorrow’s people look like?
In my view, they balance resilience, leadership and connectedness between themselves, their communities and the natural environment, building human, social and natural capital every day. Like CSR, they have ISR. That is, they recognize and engage their individual social responsibility (ISR) and help move the places where they work further toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the places where they live further toward a sustainable future. They have a new connection to their needs, to the needs of their communities and to the those of the world in a way I call “I Am Sustainability/We Are Sustainability”.
How do we get there?
Through connecting current action and thought leaders in a global effort. These are the positive deviants, social entrepreneurs, knowledge managers, leaders for world benefit, boundary managers etc, etc. that are emerging, and connect them into a global network of learning systems research for sustainable development. That is what Ecosphere Net is all about.
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
]]>Here is the link (click here).
Well researched, well written and well presented.
Know the facts.
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
]]>Beyond the obfuscations.
Here is the reality check:
Achieving global sustainability and sustainable development is about more than “going green” and mitigating climate change. A successful transition toward a sustainable global future is a complex multi-variable problem that requires both innovation in science and technology, adaptive governance and broad-based changes in human behavior. It refers to the task of meeting basic human needs worldwide while preserving the life supporting ecosystems of the planet at the same time. There remains little doubt that we are currently failing at both. In general terms, an improvement in coupled social-ecological systems, that is, human–nature interactions and human-human relationships across global societies is necessary.
There will soon be 9 billion people here, far exceeding the capacity of the Earth’s natural resources to sustain everyone and, very likely, pushing ecosystems away from current life supporting configurations.
As Tariq Banuri has suggested, let’s consider our home Earthland. We only have one.
EJ Wensing
USVI
]]>The various attempts to motivate people across global societies into actions more equitable with a sustainable future can be seen as currently occurring along three fronts: 1) Direct public education efforts such as through schools, corporations and the social media, 2) through the implementation of governance and policy for sustainable development, and 3) utilizing initiatives that seek to bridge knowledge and innovation in science and technology for sustainability and sustainable development into local action. Successes and difficulties have been experienced with each type of initiative such that collectively they have resulted in a limited amount of action across global societies toward a sustainable future.
At Ecosphere Net we are currently developing a research based initiative that seeks to link and organize all three approaches into valid and effective collaborative action. Stay tuned to this blog for more details over the next months.
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
]]>During this holiday many people in the U.S. reflect on what they are thankful for and what they truly value.
Perhaps that’s what all holidays are about in a way, a time for reflection on our values.
At Thanksgiving there are many things to be thankful for.
For instance, how it is possible through our hard work and through the many opportunities available to us to pursue and achieve our values in our privileged lives.
Opportunities that most people in the world don’t have, despite their willingness and ability to work hard for values most people in the world share.
Research has shown that values are fairly universal regardless of cultures or global society.
For example, we all value freedom, peace, human rights and a sustainable world we can all live in.
Those are values that require all of us to work together.
Our role is to relentlessly co-create the opportunities to make our shared values happen.
Our shared values around the world will lead us to a sustainable future.
EJ Wensing, US Virgin Islands
]]>In our presentation, entitled, “A Systems Approach toward Evaluating the Triple Bottom Line” we consider organizational leadership, organizational development and their role in evolving improvement in a company’s triple bottom line. Our perspective will be from that of a complex adaptive system (CAS). Using tools and language from complexity science and the field of Human Systems Dynamics, we will focus on opportunities for effecting and measuring change in large and small ways.
“Triple Bottom Line” refers to the objective of focusing not just on the single bottom line of profit, as has historically been the case, but rather on the more socially responsible – and inherently more profitable over the long-term – bottom line of people, planet and profit.
Among other topics regarding CAS, we consider systems control v. emergence along supply chains from the local to the global. Today’s management and organizational development leaders are realizing that the complexity of global supply chains precludes their full control. In fact, it’s often better to let organizational development and leadership emerge rather than to attempt to control it.
The challenge in organizational development is to know how much of each is just right in an evolving situtation. How much to let emerge and how much to control in organizational development; and how to optimize organizational leadership within that balance. That is where evaluation comes in.
Mallary is interested in exploring self-organization in a CAS and its relationship to improving the triple bottom line. Her focus is in developing simple tools to assist small- and medium-sized businesses and organizations in developing strategic and tactical approaches to sustainability.
My own focus is on how to identify the characteristics and skills of the individual leaders that are best suited for this endeavor of working within an organization that sees itself, as more and more rightfully are, as a CAS.
Through our work in research and developing the evaluation of leadership and organizations within the real world corporate context of complex adaptive systems, Mallary and I hope to help move our world closer to a sustainable global future.
More information on Mallary’s work can be found at her website Healthy Workplaces.
EJ Wensing
US Virgin Islands
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