The Necessary Revolution - Peter Senge et al - Part 1

The Necessary Revolution
- Peter Senge et al.

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 56

 February 25, 2017 

Book 17 - The Necessary Revolution:
How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World
by Peter M. Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley (2008)
 Part 1 - pages 3-54
Reading Time - 1 hour

This book ties in nicely with several of the other ones that I have been reading: The Spirit Level, Silent Spring and The Upcycle. Here's the premise of this one: the Industrial Revolution gave us a lot of things but... it has taken us as far as it can. We are now on the downside of the Industrial Revolution. The resources we have are finite and we need to look at sustainability if we are to survive. The side effects of the Industrial Revolution are unsustainable.

Think about it... the 200 richest people in the world have a greater combined income than the poorest 2,500,000,000 people in the world. Crazy. The authors present some guiding ideas for the future:

• There is no viable path forward that does not take into account the needs of future generations,
• Institutions matter - whether they are NGOs, corporations or governments,
• All real change is grounded in new ways of thinking and perceiving.

Essentially, we need to work together differently and see things differently. The Industrial Revolution wasn't planned, it was innovated, and it is our combined creativity and innovation that will generate the next revolution. And we're going to need all the creativity we can get. Did you know 90% of plastics end up as solid waste? That 90% of raw materials end up as waste? We are not a sustainable ecosystem, are we? This brings to mind The Upcycle... the idea that waste from one industry process, is fuel for another. That we can make the water cleaner after it comes out of a factory than before it went in.

But how are we going to get there? The authors note that short-term lobbying isn't going to get us there... what we need is long term changes and that requires us to look at systems thinking and see the patterns. See how everything is connected, rather than trying to fix things individually.

There is also the idea, and a rather scary one, that we are living in an Industrial Revolution bubble. Outside the bubble is Nature. We have tended to see the economy as most important and forgotten that the economy lives within Society and Society lives within Nature. Our economy is unsustainable. We, in the developed world, use a ridiculous amount of the world's resources, and that can't continue. That's the bubble... Because in the global village, there is only one boat, and a hole will sink us all.

And there's the rub... we have acted as if the economy and money are the most important thing. That Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the true measure of our worth as a society. Interestingly... Bhutan, a tiny little kingdom country squished between India and Tibet doesn't use GDP... they use GNH - Gross National Happiness. They measure things like forest cover, children nutrition, education levels and health of the elderly. Isn't that cool?

It's kind of crazy that our average pound of food travels 2000 miles to reach our plate. Or that 1 glass of orange juice needs two litres of oil to transport. Here's the ticket:

• See the Larger System - none of us countries are islands
• Collaborate Across Boundaries - national, corporate, whatever
• Creating Futures We Truly Deserve - not reacting to things

I like this book - it gives me some hope for the future.