No matter how you try, there is just no escaping the world is becoming increasingly complex.  It doesn’t matter what field of study, which occupation, or where in the world you look, the world has without a doubt become more complex.  As a species, our ability to communicate certainly distinguishes us from other species, but I think what truly makes us stand apart is our ability to handle a range of very complex tasks.  No other species on earth has this kind of ability.  If you sit for a moment and think about all the things we do “naturally,” say for example communicating through spoken or written language, it’s pretty hard not to be amazed.  Add to that what we’ve done with the built environment, or say the digital revolution, or maybe putting people and other useful objects into space and your head begins to spin. 

Arguably complexity, something we handle with aplomb and largely ignore in one domain, is one of the biggest impediments to sustainability and communicating about sustainability in a way that is meaningful to people.  Now I know some of you might object and say that of course we understand what sustainability means since it has been variously defined over the past 40 –50 years and is now reduced to catchy phrases like “people, planet and profit.”     And you remember why keeping things to three points is a good thing, right?   But let’s face it, once we get past the catchy phrase, we almost immediately begin to stumble; “okay, so how do I make a decision that incorporates people, the planet and profit?”  Hmmmm………

I think there is no way around the fact that we have to embrace the inherent complexity that attends sustainability and learn to manage it just like we do other parts of our lives.  I’d like to help people more easily grasp sustainability by reducing it to the magic three points but I can’t.  Sustainability demands that you take a multivariate, multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional, multi-generational approach and there is no way around it.   In a way, I don’t understand why sustainability is so hard to understand, but as I was thinking of a suitably strained analogy, I thought of Opera.  Now that’s a stretch, isn’t it?  I know many don’t like opera and find it hard to understand (just a bunch of portly people yelling at each other in a foreign language, right?), but at some level the analogy, though strained, may work and offer something we can bridge to, even if the bridge is a bit rickety. 

In Opera, we have the libretto (the words), we have the music (which is usually provided by an orchestra, and which is a complex collection of notes, lines of music, harmonics, melodies, etc. all by itself), we have the voices (people), we have the story (the context), the stage (the built environment), the opera house (the larger environment), and the time it takes for the opera to be performed.  Neither one of these elements of opera would stand on its own and convey the meaning that you have when all are combined.  Think about it.  The words can have multiple meanings, convey a moral principle, provide a comedic moment through a double entendres, or just provide a memorable story.  Music is considered by some as the most abstract of all art and it conveys a wealth of meaning, expresses the inexpressible, and provides a vehicle for the words that transforms the combination into something transcendent.  But music without the words, while perhaps being able to transport us, may not be as rich.  When we add the voice, the person behind the voice, the stage and the acoustic perfection of the building in the presence of an enthusiastic audience we have a wholly different experience of the world.  And for those of us who love it, we never want the opera to end.

So it is with sustainability.  Take any one of the elements out of the mix and no doubt you can manage and you’ll probably even move things forward for quite a while.  But ultimately, I think what you are doing will lack meaning and is likely to leave you dull-witted or in a state of stupefaction.   In the case of the world, ignore the environment, ignore people, or ignore our economy, and you can’t survive in the long-term.   In future posts I’ll return to this theme of complexity and hopefully provide some additional thoughts that might help move us forward.

As always, let me  know what you think.