Led by Wim Hafkamp
~Member, The Balaton Group~
VISION
Resolve
ACTION
“If we haven’t specified where we want to go, it is hard to set our compass, to muster enthusiasm, or to measure progress. But vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our culture. We talk easily and endlessly about our frustrations, doubts, and complaints, but we speak only rarely, and sometimes with embarrassment, about our dreams and values.”
—Dana Meadows in Envisioning a Sustainable World, February 12, 1996
WITH DANA’S INSPIRATION, LET’S CONTINUE HER WALK OF SUSTAINABILITY…
Today I commemorate Dana Meadows. I think of her contributions to a transformation of our lives, our work, our society, and to move toward a sustainable world. With mind and heart, body and soul, Dana applied the science of systems dynamics and sustainability into practices of organic farming, the ecological village, and community building. She took risks in doing so, and told us many times how she feared backlash or the risk of failure of a project. And then she went on with that project. Afraid, but determined. Engaged, enthusiastic, proactive, yet with reflection.
Today I reflect and resolve to take action to contribute to building a sustainable world.
Participants’ commitments to carry on the legacy:
I resolve to develop even 100th of Dana’ s knowledge, courage and voice. I resolve to know the earth more intimately, to love it, and to spread that knowledge and love. I resolve to be conscious, moment to moment, of what and how I consume. I resolve to consume on purpose toward regeneration of love and life.
I resolve today to begin the process of redirecting the application of my talents and skills away from the design and creation of consumer goods and toward the design and creation of a sustainable life for myself and others.
Learn to grow food. Be a one-car family. Buy used as often as possible. Eat less meat, and then non-factory farmed meat. Buy recycled, organic products. Bike to do nearby errands, rather than drive. Try to understand “quality of life” in a new way — one not attached to consumption. Financially support sustainability organizations.
Organic agriculture and source reduction.
I will write about this work for Buddhist Peace Fellowships, Reevaluation Counseling International, and will look for wider circles to write for.
I resolve to develop a sitting or meditation practice to increase my internal courage and strength in order to take on the hard problems that face us all and the world.
To garden and grow my own food without chemicals to learn how to feel with heart and to think with my heart to get clarity about how I am colonized by the very system that is killing life on earth.
To promote ecological consciousness by teaching ecopsychology in all possible settings, from neighborhood gatherings to national conferences. To attend to the source of everything I levy.
As a Pew scholar, I had the pleasure of discussing many ideas about sustainability with Dana. Inspired in part by some of these discussions, my colleagues and I set up an environmental institute, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in Bangalore, India (www.atree.org). ATREE shares many goals with Dana’s sustainability institute and we will continue to promote those goals.
Working on ways for people to float about the earth and watch the human and nature dominated portions of their watersheds and ecological footprints interact and evolve through time. Introducing people to the natural world so they don’t think water comes from the tap and food from the grocery [store].
Bring together elders in the 80’s (like me) with school—age children to explore concrete things to do together to make our community good to live in.
I resolve to inspire others at my future workplace, a fuel cell manufacturing and development company, that their work has a higher purpose. I will influence the company to the greatest of my ability to move towards sustainability. As practice, I resolve to give a speech to my fellow classmates at MIT, during a leadership course, on the importance of industry pro-activity on environmental issues.
Learn to and then articulate my vision of a sustainable world to those I encounter, through academic networks and within the corporation where I will work. I will try to become better at engaging others in the process of shedding layers of words, numbers, and norms, to understand and feel the hope that is within us. I never met Dana personally, and yet she sits inside my heart now to remind me of what I really want for this world.
To reach beyond my own institution to lecture, teach, and persuade others to make a difference.
I resolve to bring what I have learned through living in and working in an aspiring eco-village for the past 21 years to a wider audience and world. And further to continue to dedicate my life and energy to creating a sustainable future, for humanity and for all species we share this beautiful world with.
To write: to begin to communicate my passion, experience, and understanding. To study: to continue a tradition of lifelong learning. To act: to build partnership for our common sustainability that engages all members of the citizenry beyond the realm of an environmental elite.
Create an environment of loving kindness for myself and others so that the best in each of us is more easily revealed, decreasing the consumption and aggression borne of fear, hurt and loneliness. I will challenge myself and those around me to be true to our heart’s true desires. I will live at a human, not superhuman pace, while taking time daily to connect with the divine.
To become part of a cooperative that is both socially and environmentally aware and through practicing those actions daily.
To help us save even more fossil fuels and other treasures by finding ways to bring webex type, real time online collaborations to become a working tool for sustainability activists and other change workers.
Work to help bring sustainable building practices (energy efficiency, water efficiency, tour impact materials) into the mainstream of the multibillion-dollar home remodeling industry.
Continue to look for opportunities through my work to be an advocate: to “talk truth to power.” To ride my bike more and drive less. To get to know Dana’s vision and principles by finding and reading her writings – and then apply them to my life.
Replace my boiler with a more fuel-efficient model. Initiate and stay in contact with the Sustainability Institute to learn about local actions in my area.
Reflect and engage love in my work.
Continue on the quest to reduce over-consumption–both personally and in this country.
Gray water use combined with my career change–plumber. This after spending 17 years in the medical field (statistics) doing survival analysis.
Finish writing a couple of population papers that I’ve been work on for sometime now. These few papers are part of my effort in making a better world (MABW).
Stay longer in one place (less running around and pretending to accomplish). Find quiet, reflection, resolve, a spiritual home, and then reach out from that place with the most powerful persuasive words that I can find…Dana chided me to write more, and more often, about our future. This I owe her memory. But I will do it because it must be done.
To follow through, daily, on the positive steps I learned through my Ecoteam experience but haven’t yet done! And, to be more open about sharing those steps with others by maintaining my integrity with these actions.
Link the social justice and human rights perspective more closely to economic and environmental efforts of sustainability.
Not to lose heart or be afraid. To remember Dana everyday and try to live more as she did.
To find a way to make people aware of the environmental effects of their choices, specifically regarding buying SUVs.
I am committed to writing and producing a television documentary series on the importance of coral reefs. This series will have a web component with solutions, readings, and actions viewers can take to help. I’m dedicated to raising the money for producing the series. This information and the stories about those whose lives are intimately connected with our reefs need to be told and need to be heard. Keeping reefs and the creatures that live in and around them will make the world a better place for all of us.
To increase my conscientious federal tax resistance from a symbolic amount to that portion of federal budget in the given year that goes for armaments — and to give that amount to people and organizations building human community and sustainable economic and environmental conditions. This is civil disobedience turned toward building sustainable community.
Continue to teach environmental issues to young women at my school, using Race to Save the Planet and Dana’s writings. Continue to encourage members of my Cambridge co-housing community to live lightly on this planet — use organic food, conserve energy. Continue to live lightly on this beautiful planet.
Continue to concentrate on my personal use of resources – drive less, compost more, buy more organic foods. In work with school health professionals, pay more attention to environmental issues.
To speak the words love and God/spirit more and more frequently in my life and work.
Speak truth to power drawing on the “Balaton Perspective” in whatever form I can. Be fearless in communicating what I now to be true. Like Dana.
I will write and publish teaching cases (for business school classes) on decisions that carry an impact on sustainability. Examples: -Decisions on completing Dana’s projects at Cobb Hill or the Institute. —Decisions in businesses or not-for-profit organizations, that business students can learn from.
Reflect -> Revise -> Do -> Write -> Reflect
I reflect and resolve that I will: continue to work on living within the limits; to use no more than 1/6,000,000,000 of the world’s resources, no more than 1/30,000,000 of a species’ share; bring my passion and emotion to my professional sustainability work so that others are empowered to do the same; to extend Dana’s work the length and breadth of the Connecticut River bioregion – the home I share with Dana and her spirit.
To actively disseminate and promote a graphic holistic model of sustainability based on human and life needs in order to engage in dialogue on what really matters.
I listen to farmers through my institute in Vermont building a farm-composting cooperative to reduce fossil fuels and run-off polluting rivers & streams. I listen to engineers, financiers, world citizens to help them realize how to make energy from ocean currents, arid rivers without dams in remote places without roads or transmission lines.
I will teach about the human condition until people’s sense of moral community expands to match the scale of the problems they create. New forms of engagement will be required to expand the human moral capacity for love.
Tell people about Dana, her life, her work and spirit, which I learned, for the first time, about today. Read her works. To continue organizing efforts of the Mass Climate Action Network (www.massclimateaction.org), Cambridge Climate Calendar, and Green Building Coalition.
To continue to try to build 75 units of low-income housing with superior energy efficiency–shooting for zero non-renewable energy consumption. This will allow the extremely low-income (mostly) women to invest their utility savings in IDA’s (individual development accounts). Also, to do this in a way that builds community among the low-income women.
I resolve to work for a more equitable society–to close the gap between the wealthy and others, and do so with as much love, intelligence, still and humor that I can muster.
Protect a piece of land with easement and sustainable practice and love of it.
I resolve to keep working to transform my ‘blaming energy’ regarding environmental issues, into doing-with-love. And to keep recycling, and to make a contribution to the sustainability institute, and to drive less/walk and bike more!
SUV campaign in a non-judgmental way.
To view my work less in terms of career success or failure and more in terms of the environmental impact I am making.
I will work to integrate long-term environmental and human change into short-term decision- making, in my own life and in public policy at all scales.
Work to get energy-efficient and cost saving devices widespread in developing nations.
To support a mission which helps people shift towards a more plant-based diet through compassionate action = listening, teaching, and through example.
To work as a practicing architect, activist, and citizen in designing and building cities, neighborhoods, and places that support future sustainable work.
I work toward creating and strengthening using local and national mechanisms that will help people better understand global change, and the place of their actions, behaviors, values, and dreams in shaping it.
I will build stronger relationships with friends and colleagues that are hoping for and working to build a sustainable world. I will promote cooperation and community.
I resolve to never participate in or perform scientific activities and research that do not make every attempt to consider the ethical, social, and spiritual dimensions of such.
Start up a venture and turn a parking garage from an unsafe, dark, smelly, “black hole” into a mobility center for sustainable transportation and urban encounter.
To teach, to write, to think, to act, as Dana would.
Drawing on the inspiration of Dana’s life and voice, I will gather a group of women to begin a dialogue on the question: how can women uniquely contribute to shifting the world onto a path to sustainability?
In the new job I take in the conservation/development world, to be unafraid to “speak truth to power.”
In the writing I do, I will speak from the foundation of bedrock truth.
I will work on enlarging that part of me that is a bit like Dana.
To keep my garden, plant publicly sustainable nuts and berries, and live within a reduced ecological footprint. I will endeavor to produce my own electricity with a one-window solar electric installation and _ hour daily of human power operating a hand or foot generator and to show others how they can live comfortably doing the same.
Find out about political pressure groups for sustainable reform and do things like attend a protest against terribly energy inefficient vehicles, and write and try to meet with people in positions of power and influence to engage them in constructive dialogue about issues of sustainability.
Educate others–both at work and outside of work–on the core ideas behind systems thinking. Do it in the moment when a relevant issue is confronted, and when the impact/retention will likely be greatest.
