What We Think
Perhaps the greatest barrier to a paradigm shift, in some cases, is the reality of paradigm paralysis: the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking.
Lee Bryant
Global sustainability in this changing world requires a complete rethinking of our ways of seeing, valuing and measuring progress and our ways of operating in an interdependent world.
Input to the UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability
“Indicators and economic and social policies must integrate environmental externalities and social impacts to avoid marginalizing millions of people while overstepping ecological boundaries.
“We must promote social and scientific innovation and encourage structural change in our extraction, production and waste disposal systems;
“we must improve resilience at all levels from the neighborhood scale to the global scale to global and national resource shocks, natural disasters and volatility;
“we must ensure sustainable value creation through investment and incentives in support of sustainability,
“we must build new markets for sustainable goods and services.
“Above all we must also ensure that the benefits of such an approach accrue to all, as there is no sustainability without equity and justice.
“This is the challenge in front of us.
We can work within the current paradigm to address the most pressing environmental and economic challenges the world faces today. We can also devote our efforts to formulate a new system, a new paradigm from which we can tackle these challenges.
These two approaches don’t need to be mutually exclusive. They can be addressed simultaneously to get feedback from each other. We think that a new paradigm on sustainable development can be the umbrella under which the new solutions for our old problems can be obtained. Thinking from a new perspective can create new ideas and new solutions to be applied at the global, regional and local levels.
This is not something we could do. This is something we MUST do. Our subsistence depends on it.
