Thriving Beyond sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society

by Andrés R. Edwards, New Society Publishers, 2010

Reviews and Endorsements

From sustainability to resilience is the theme of Andres Edwards's new book . . . it is an inventory of grounded hope, practical inspiration, and achievable visions . . . exactly the kind of thinking, work, and doing that will bring civilization to safe harbor.

-- David W. Orr, Author, Down to the Wire

Andrés Edwards has given us a comprehensive, up-to-date, and highly inspiring guide to the pioneering initiatives and practices of individuals, organizations, and communities from around the world who strive to create a future that is ecologically sustainable and socially just. With countless lively examples, the author shows how impressive progress is being made along many different paths, which are about to coalesce into a powerful force for change. The book takes into account the overwhelming scientific evidence of the systemic interconnectedness of the world's major problems, as well as the ecological literacy of time-honored indigenous wisdom. It is thoroughly researched, deeply contemplated, and yet eminently practical. I warmly recommend it to anyone concerned about the future of human civilization.

-- Fritjof Capra, Author, The Web of Life and The Hidden Connections

Edwards covers a breathtaking swath of world-changing stories, frameworks and tools that are essential knowledge for the sustainability advocate. You can't help but feel optimistic after reading this book.

-- Adam Werbach, Global CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi S

Thriving Beyond Sustainability is simply a must-read. It offers a concise, insightful and deeply thoughtful overview of the most hopeful and important emergent trends and ideas driving the global sustainability movement. You will also find an eminently readable book that has shelf life. Edwards is sophisticated, and his nuanced analysis and discernment could not be more timely as green goes mainstream and everyone wants to know: What do we do?

-- Kenny Ausubel, Co-CEO and Founder of Bioneers

Andrés Edwards is a walking database of information on efforts to create sustainable societies, and his enthusiasm for the promise of sustainability is infectious. Read Thriving Beyond Sustainability and your belief in the prospects for human survival--no, human "thriveability"--will brighten dramatically!

-- Gary Gardner, Senior Researcher, Worldwatch Institute

Peppered with examples, Thriving Beyond Sustainability presents a delectable feast of people, communities, companies, and countries thriving by reducing energy and water use, waste, and cost."

-- David Blockstein, Senior Scientist National Council for Science and the Environment

For those of you who have given up, who believe that making environmental change is too hard or too late, this book is not for you. For those ready to be inspired and energized, read this book right away. Edwards’s latest book is chock-full of examples of real solutions, advanced by real people all over the globe – solutions that can build a lasting path towards sustainability.

-- Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff

Thriving Beyond Sustainability challenges us to move from using a deficit model for thinking about sustainability to using a natural and human abundance approach to thinking about how society will thrive. Edwards provides the reader with both principles and examples from throughout the world. He gives concrete suggestions for action and provides an annotated resource list that supports taking actions. This is a welcome addition to the growing sustainability literature.

-- Paul Rowland, Ph.D., Executive Director, Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education

Thriving Beyond Sustainability captures the spirit of the people and organizations finding solutions that are creating a brighter future for all. In this important book, Edwards presents engaging stories about the positive impact that leaders are making in transforming their communities through green building, energy, agriculture and green business practices among others. A fabulous resource for those interested in learning about the challenges and opportunities before us.

-- David Johnston, Author, Toward a Zero Energy Home and Green Remodeling

INSPIRING SOLUTIONS

At last, a holistic picture of a transformed way of living on the earth! Not just living, but "thriving."

The book ties together stories about initiatives now underway to transform "five interrelated global trends: ecosystem decline, energy transition, population growth, economic disparity,and climate change."

These stories draw a collective picture of new ways of doing things to restore our personal and cultural health and rejuvenate the ecosystem. Thriving Beyond Sustainability gives examples of the outer situation we find ourselves in along with the resources - outer and inner - we have to bring about new possibilities. Edwards encourages the shift from "sustaining" to "thriving" as a challenge to expand our imagination and focus on the capacity of the human spirit to collaborate in creating meaningful changes that improve the lives of all species.

Thrivability thus becomes a new code word for recognizing the human "capacity for empathy, compassion, collaboration, playfulness, creativity, enthusiasm and love." This seems an easy shift to make, and cuts through ideas that separate classes, races, nationalities, and religions. Once we acknowledge that humans are innately cooperative and seek to thrive, competition and scarcity become outdated concepts and we see how the "examples" can become the mainstream. I fully embrace this book.

-- Kristin A. Pauly, Annapolis, MD

There are plenty of books detailing the dire condition of our relationship with the environment; rather than focus on the many problems surrounding sustainability, Andres Edwards focuses on turning challenges into opportunity in this slim and useful guide. As he identifies a number of successful projects and ideas from around the world, Edwards covers commerce, green design and ultra-local sustainability efforts. At the end of each chapter, Edwards presents concise, bullet-pointed steps for taking action, useful for everyone from the individual hoping to cut his carbon footprint to the serious activist. Add this to pages and pages of links to local, national and international resource groups, and you have one of the more practical and positive sustainability tools available.

-- Next American City (americancity.org)

In his new book, Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society (2010), Andres Edwards moves well beyond his initial and seminal description of the cultural paradigm change suggested by The Sustainability Revolution (2005) to a much broader and encompassing vision of how the sustainability movement is gaining momentum and credibility. Based on his initial premise that these shifts were already well underway in fields as diverse as economics, environmental consciousness, and social justice (equity)—the 3 “E’s” of sustainability—Edwards has gone on to ground these in real changes taking place in many segments of our society. In the earlier work, he documented in detail many of the formalized gatherings and proposals for creating a sustainable presence on our home world. In this new work, he has created a collective map to show how individuals, organizations, and communities are collaborating to restore ecological health, reinvent outmoded institutions, and revive our social, environmental, and economic systems.

This latest work is the result of many further explorations, interviews, and solicitations from those leading the charge into a future of hope and possibility. Beginning with an exploration of the influence and teachings of indigenous cultures on our present society, Edwards focuses on what will make our Earth Island survivable for future generations. There are many examples of cultures and societies who have failed to make this leap into the future. In this book the author places his attention on those traditional societies that have successfully persisted over time and contributed insights that are valuable to modern efforts at sustainability. He then moves beyond this grounding in our roots to examine initiatives across the globe that are striving to become more self-reliant in energy conservation, food production, and local services. It is a natural step from there to look at the greening of commerce in ways that reduce environmental impact and mirror the cycles of natural systems. This is a much larger endeavor that extends to green building practices, eco-communities, and the design of functional living systems that reflect nature and allow our citizens to live in greater comfort and security.

Edwards then moves on to examine worldwide efforts to restore ecosystems in decline and protect biodiversity. He identifies five interrelated global trends that command our attention: ecosystem decline, energy transition, population growth, economic disparity, and climate change. In his view, all these conditions are converging and present both great challenge and great opportunity. This provocative treatise explores each of these in turn and suggests courses that might be followed to convert potential dissolution of our existing social and economic systems to great possibilities for creating a new future based on principles that are being tried and tested in a variety of circumstances. He suggests a new set of strategies which he calls SPIRALS involving initiatives that are: Scalable, Place-making, Intergenerational, Resilient, Accessible, Life-affirming, and Self-care. The content of this volume explores these characteristics in detail under the context of striving for Thriveability and not just sustainability. It will take a concerted effort and commitment to move to this new stage of human and social development, but it is a path open to our exploration.

This new concept, thriveability, focuses on a vision of collaboration and abundance where, instead of seeing ourselves separate from nature, we become an integral part of natural systems and embody qualities such as empathy, compassion, and creativity to guide our actions within the human community. This entails a capacity for belief in the human spirit to create new systems of prosperity and peace. We must begin, he suggests, by healing and greening our own lives and then reaching out to the larger community. In each chapter in this book, Edwards suggests strategies to bring about this reality and specific actions in which each of us can be engaged. This is a beautifully written and eloquent plea for us to wake up to our potential and begin to exercise our natural talents for survival. An extensive resource list at the end provides a wealth of references for further research. This volume is written in a spirit of hope and promise that, if we are willing to follow a fairly simple and direct path, we indeed can have a viable future.

-- Rick Medrich, co-founder and chair of PhD program in Sustainability Education at Precott College, Prescott, AZ.

The more research you do into the subject of sustainability, the more you realize that talking about sustainability is like talking about matter. It's so wide-ranging, multifaceted and pervasive a topic that it's hard even to know where to begin. "Sustainable development" is often equated with environmental protection and conservation, but it's actually far broader than that, encompassing economic, political and sociocultural concerns as well. Defined simply as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,"* sustainable development is more a general approach than a specific set of practices or policies. And it can be applied across literally all sectors of human endeavor, from education to enterprise—and from fine arts to the physical sciences.

Given what a sweeping category sustainability is, author and noted sustainability expert Andrés Edwards is to be commended for distilling it down into two easily digestible volumes for lay readers: The Sustainability Revolution and Thriving Beyond Sustainability. The first book, released in 2005 by New Society Publishers and subtitled as a "Portrait of a Paradigm Shift," showed how large numbers of individuals and organizations across the world had come to recognize the failings of the industrial "growth" economy fast undermining its own ecological foundations, and had begun to forge pathways toward a sustainable future. Their grassroots efforts, Edwards predicted, would prove to be vital guideposts along the uncertain course ahead for humanity. This first book was mostly a theory study; Edwards recalls that he didn't get a chance to flesh out its concepts with tangible examples to the extent that he would have liked. Hence the need for this new book (also from New Society), which he says is intended to share "the stories of the people and organizations undertaking this important work."**

The method of Thriving Beyond Sustainability is straightforwardness itself: the book simply gathers together pointed examples of several key themes long at the core of the global sustainability conversation. The first chapter, titled "Lessons from Our Ancestors," reminds us of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond's case, articulated in his bestselling book Collapse, that human civilizations often decline largely as a result of having despoiled the natural capital on which they depend. Edwards poignantly demonstrates how the modern developed world stands to learn as much from the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island, who went into steep decline after they over-harvested their trees and marine life, as it does from the Inuit, who have managed to thrive for centuries in the Earth's North Polar regions. Some other notable chapters include those on regenerative design, saving ecosystems, going "glocal" and the evolution of the corporate world's new "triple bottom line"—which requires that companies heed social and ecological concerns in addition to economic imperatives when making decisions.

In a vision that will please technological optimists but will seem like blatant pie in the sky to the more pessimistic among the environmental crowd, Edwards insists that with the right approach industrial society can attain a state not only of sustainability, but of "thriveability." Edwards never gives a clear-cut definition of thriveability but he does eloquently describe how it differs from sustainability. "Sustainability," he writes, "separates us from nature and envisions us 'getting by' by limiting our negative environmental impacts over the long term." Thriveability, in contrast, represents a "shift from 'less bad' solutions to solutions that energize us and improve our quality of life through our connections with all life forms."

Edwards asserts that if we citizens of the developed world are to successfully meet our biggest challenges as a civilization (which he deems to be ecosystem decline, energy transition, population growth, economic disparity and climate change), then we must drastically change our entire worldview so that it reflects a thriveability perspective. He says that before beginning any new sustainability initiative we must first evaluate the extent to which it is "Scalable, Place-making, International, Resilient, Accessible, [and] Life-affirming," as well as whether or not it promotes "Self-care" (these criteria go by the acronym SPIRALS). We must also follow the precautionary principle, which states that if there is any doubt as to a proposed initiative's potential risks, we must err on the side of caution and forego implementing it until we have better information.

In the chapters that follow, Edwards presents a thorough analysis of how individuals, corporations, national and regional governments, nonprofits and international organizations, among countless others, are currently undertaking projects that espouse SPIRALS ideals. For example, he highlights the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, as an exemplary model of the place-making dimension of SPIRALS. The project aims to transform intersections into lively public squares dubbed "Share-It Squares," which foster community and help reclaim public spaces. Edwards points out that crime rates in these repaired sections of the city fell by 10 percent following their conversion into public squares, as reported in the Journal of Public Health. And he cites the environmentally responsible forestry practices of lumber company Menominee Tribal Enterprises (MTE) as a prime example of SPIRALS' intergenerational component. MTE embraces the "seventh generation" thinking of traditional Native American ethics, which requires that today's decisions be made with a view toward how they might affect people living seven generations from now. Under this directive, the Menominee Forest's total timber volume has not dwindled but rather has steadily grown from 1.3 billion to more than 1.7 billion board feet over the past century and a half.

Where Edwards' analysis falls short, however, is in attempting to illustrate the scalable and accessible aspects of the SPIRALS framework. Compared to the others, these two sections seem overly brief and light on specific examples. For instance, Edwards provides only one concrete example of a present or emerging initiative demonstrating the scalability part of SPIRALS. And that one example, a nationwide infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs) as envisioned by the EV service provider Better Place, is patently of dubious scalability, as anyone can tell you who has bothered to look into the daunting obstacles that impede wide-scale EV adoption. Further, Edwards sometimes seems to be hammering an example into a particular subset of the SPIRALS framework, when in fact it could just as easily fit into a completely different one, or even multiple subsets.

But these are relatively minor flaws in what is, for the most part, a comprehensive, prodigiously studied panorama of today's sustainability landscape. Drawing on its author's considerable knowledge of ecological design, sustainable business, environmental education and community development projects, Thriving Beyond Sustainability is sure to be one of the authoritative desk references on sustainability for some time to come.

* The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43.
** Andrés R. Edwards, Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2010), ix.

-- Frank Kaminski is a member of Seattle Peak Oil Awareness (SPOA), a connoisseur of post-oil novels and a regular book reviewer for Energy Buletin.