Mission
Our mission is “To deepen our awareness and understanding of the challenges facing the world and the development of creative and enduring solutions, and to support the leaders of the emerging sustainability revolution.“
The truth is that we need to create a new conversation – or rather a series of new conversations – that are undergirded by a new sense of reality. Humanity is, quite visibly and quite rapidly, overwhelming the carrying capacity of the planet. The question is, what to do about it?
We face, frankly, an unprecedented situation. Scientists have been warning us for several decades, and for the most part we have failed to change direction. We now face a world of accelerating climate change, of mass extinction, of resource depletion, of destabilization and dislocation on many levels. Individuals in our society are now trying to operate in the face of economic circumstances that are largely beyond their control; the rate of unemployment is over 9% and getting worse; the number of homeless, hungry, and sick people is increasing; and while outright economic collapse appears to have been averted, the current economic order is clearly in chaos. It cannot, moreover, be “put back together again,” even with financial re-regulation, fiscal stimulus, or bailouts of the financial system. We need to reinvent our entire economic system, and we need to reinvent it on the basic of a new definition of prosperity.
A number of people – including some economists – have been talking about this notion of “redefining wealth” or changing what is measured by the GDP. They point out, quite rightly, that much of what is included in the “Gross Domestic Product” is not wealth at all, but represents a real cost to society. Adding up the cost of war, of health care, of education, of cleaning up toxic wastes, and of making SUVs really makes no sense if these things are not actually adding value to the economy. But the problem is not simply that a few negative things have to be taken out. The problem is that the majority of what is being measured is not valuable, and is not sustainable even in the short run, so the entire way in which we measure the economy needs to be thrown out.
We are not necessarily suggesting, as does the Kingdom of Bhutan for instance, that we ought to be measuring “gross national happiness,” but we want something that is a kind of hard-headed version of this, namely a measure of true ecosystemic value. The bottom line is that unless we are striving for the restoration of our ecological systems we are striving for their demise; and since we are inextricable from our ecological systems, so this also means our own demise.
The mission of the Sustainable Leadership Forum is, then, to challenge us all to find and forge a new way forward; a way that recognizes the realities and the challenges we face; and that enables us to create the solutions we know are possible and are indeed waiting to happen. This is not green boosterism. It’s simply a recognition of our unavoidable mission.
Here is an overview of what we intend to provide:
The four pillars of the program are the Peer Network or membership program, the Transformational Leadership courses, the volunteer program, and the Program Investment Fund.