A Better Planet: 40 Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future

27 Jul

‘A Better Planet: 40 Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future’ is a book edited by celebrated scholar Daniel C. Esty containing a collection of essays by leading environmental scholars and practitioners. It presents a range of ideas and perspectives that move society towards a better future. It shows a commitment to cooperation and for me, sums up the theme of the ‘Big Ideas’ section of this website. I was honoured to be invited to co-author the Epilogue with Ingrid C. Burke and have included this contribution below.

How to make big ideas work

Ingrid C. Burke and James Cameron

This volume contains a range of ideas and perspectives on how to move society toward a more sustainable future - as has the collaborative Yale Environmental Dialogue process that helped shape this book. We hope the essays in A Better Planet will inspire ongoing conversation in government departments, communities, corporate boardrooms, media centres, laboratories, nongovernmental organizations, classrooms, and beyond. Diversity of thought, and even disagreement, builds a foundation for strong policy. We are aware of the dangers big ideas pose. They have led to breakthroughs in the past, but also disasters. The development of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in the early 1900s, for instance, has helped feed a growing planet but has also damaged aquatic ecosystems, polluted drinking water, and led to hypoxia in estuaries all over the world. Nonetheless, big ideas provide essential structure for society and necessary frameworks for battling big problems in the environment. We all must therefore learn - and learn well - how to bring big ideas forward while being aware of the risks they pose, how to make them last and evolve, and how to bring people along to implement them because they find them useful, or because they connect to them emotionally.

A few important principles stand out for translating big ideas into practice and ensuring that they endure over time. First, sustainable solutions for the future are likely to require disruptive innovation. We are in the midst of nonlinear changes in the environment with human impacts on critical ecosystems increasing, sometimes at exponential rates. Our responses require proportional action and impact. Such disruption must take a number of forms - new technologies, new leaders, systems approaches, organizational structures, and activism.

Second, while technological innovation can - and must - contribute to creating the solutions equivalent to the challenges we face, we need a broader view of innovation. Educating tomorrow’s leaders can generate new breakthroughs, rapidly multiple impact, and contest existing orthodoxies. Such a spirit of fresh thinking has driven the effort to put together this book. Institutions such as the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies help create the kids of leaders who can go into both the corporations and the nonprofit organizations of America to provide challenging voices, diversity of perspectives, systems thinking, and creative solutions.

Third, serious barriers to turning big ideas into reality exist - and must be addressed. “Culture eats strategy for lunch,” as the saying goes. Big ideas that shine on paper can quickly be derailed when they run into the inertia associated with complex local conditions. Building a middle ground to overcome these barriers requires networking and better organized work, motivated by a vision for the future, and strong appreciation for local culture. This action must take place at multiple scales, from global to local - and cities, states, and other subnational entities have a central role to play in crafting sustainability solutions. Discussions at a Yale Environmental Dialogue event provided numerous examples of the need for context-specific applications of big ideas - for small farms, water treatment, waste management solutions, indoor air quality associated with cookstoves, and more. To turn ideas into the enduring practices that deliver transformative change, we must not assume that the critical breakthroughs will take the same form across different contexts.

Fourth, to implement and sustain big ideas, we should also consider how we communicate with each other. As some of the essays in this volume articulate, the right language is critical for translating scientific or technical knowledge into that which can be received and acted on more broadly. For example, politicians in many parts of the world, especially in representative democracies, have said that the majority of voters do not actively prioritize climate change. They say people do not often write letters to their member of Congress or Parliament asking them to address climate change. Instead, they write about health, jobs, transport, immigration, parks, or any number of other points. These legislators are failing to understand that climate change underlies many of the issues citizens do raise. Truly advocating big ideas requires that we explain the connection between these vital “everyday” concerns and climate change - and to communicate clearly and without alienating jargon why and how the solutions to climate change can also address concerns about housing, health, transport, and jobs. In the next breath, those that sense creativity and constraint are always connected can innovate, display real examples, and reveal a better and more attractive pathway to a sustainable future for that constituency.

Fifth, and on a similar note, change driven by big ideas requires collaborative processes, stakeholder engagement, and thoughtful conversations. Such ideas succeed only through networks of people that can identify the challenges to be overcome, explain the opportunities, and help tackle the thorny issues that inevitably arise as the process of change unfolds. We recognise that it will not be easy to get people to work together in a context where vested interests, deeply help (but sometimes opposing) beliefs, and different lived experiences make alignments difficult. But a commitment to cooperation, which clearly emerges as a core theme of this book, can aid in balancing social, economic, and environmental priorities - and getting all hands on deck to deliver a sustainable future. Jane Wei-Skillern and Nora Silver’s principles for collaboration success - highlighted in Bradford S. Gentry’s essay in this volume - resonate here: establishing shared goals, building trust but not control, promoting others before yourself, and creating constellations and not stars.

Finally, big ideas require attention to the rule of law - itself a very big idea - as well as to principles of justice and questions of power. Those most in direct need of environmental protection, those exposed to pollution of climate change impacts today, tend to be much less powerful positions. Much climate change action, for example comes from grassroots organizations, and these disparities mean they often struggle to make a major impact at the national or international level. The push for fairness through collaboration and engagement of those who are not traditionally brought to the table should also consider fairness between generations, and justice for other biological organisms on the planet. Intergenerational concerns especially matter in making sure big ideas stand the test of time. Our ideas will not last - nor should they - if they do not consider the well-being of young people and their descendants. Along with social justice, though, advancing big ideas for sustainability requires that powerful interests see incentives for themselves to change too. This broader perspective is the only way to make the transformations demanded by the environmental threats that we face.

Big ideas help construct a story of our future that is both challenging and promising - allowing us to feel that we can overcome the difficulties that we face. In this story, we can see both the necessity and the possibility of confronting and averting environmental crisis including climate change, mass human migration, water scarcity, cities at risk, biodiversity, loss, toxic exposures, and others. An expansive view of the future allows us, moreover, to better appreciate the natural wealth that we have inherited and the resources that we have been provided with which to improve the state of the world. Our mission is not just to forestall environmental damage and surfer a little bit less, but rather to rise to today’s challenges and build a better future.

More from Dan Esty on ‘A Better Planet’

This Epilogue was reproduced with permission from ‘A Better Planet: 40 Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future’, edited by Dan Esty and published by Yale University Press in 2019 in cloth and in 2020 in paperback. It is also available as an ebook edition and as an audiobook.