Book Review: Sustainability By Design
Warning: don’t be fooled by the cute sunflower on the cover, or the modest page count, John Ehrenfeld’s Sustainability by Design
Ehrenfeld’s diagnosis of the earth’s problems is that we have become addicted to Having. The addiction analogy is a great one – we want more and more stuff even though we know that getting any of it will not satisfy us for long and only make us crave more. He then uses systems theory to argue that eco-efficiency, corporate social responsibility and (the standard view* of) sustainable development won’t get us out of this addiction.
Instead he proffers and deconstructs a new definition of sustainability as “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever”. In particular the word ‘flourish’ is included to force home the idea that sustainability is not just a lack of unsustainability, but much more ambitious and positive than that. Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Heidegger, Fromm and Maturana, he argues we must move from our addiction to Having to a state of Being. To this we need to disrupt our current patterns of behaviour and he gives a range of examples of how that might be achieved.
The simplest of these is the two button toilet flush. By providing a decision point (high volume or low volume flush?) this product makes us stop and question why would we want to use more or less water and therefore links us (however briefly) to the natural world and the pressures upon it. He calls this disruption of our habits and routine by products ‘presencing’. The disruption principle is also applied to the design of organisations and governance structures. Of course Ehrenfeld cannot provide all the answers within a 215 page book, but this work provides a context and springboard for the next generation of sustainable solutions.
Despite the approachable and open writing style, this a challenging read as it covers a lot of ground very quickly and the philosophical and linguistic concepts behind the arguments can be hard to grasp if you are coming to them for the first time as I was. It certainly disrupted my thinking on sustainability and has given me a deeper understanding of the principles – particularly on the consumption side of the coin.
In short: quite brilliant, but be prepared for an intensive intellectual workout!
* I define sustainable development as the process of achieving sustainability (so this work would be part of that process), but Ehrenfeld uses the standard definitions (eg meeting today’s needs without compromising the needs of future generations).