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Date
As a project manager – or simply as a curious person, you may have been interested in the idea of sustainability – what it is, what it means, is it meaningful, and can we do anything about it.
In today’s Boston Globe, on the front page of their Ideas section, you’ll find an interesting article which is actually an interview with author Jeremy Caradonna on his book, Sustainability – a History.
You may have been interested in sustainability, but Caradonna has been fascinated by it.
The book is full of great background information on sustainability, for example, the skyrocketing use of the word over only the past 20 years or so. Does that mean that our ancestors were not interested? Does that mean that sustainability is only the proprietary use of the radical, left-wingers of the past, present or future? Not at all. The interview (and of course the book) is not your average history book.
In the interview background, we found this:
Among his surprising discoveries is that many of sustainability’s forefathers were far from radical tree-huggers. They were, rather, aristocrats and colonialists—people hoping to profit from the land—who began to fear that the heedless plundering of natural resources could jeopardize the economy. The philosophy has since evolved in various directions; some now believe that social equity is a key part of a sustainable society. What the different offshoots share is respect for the planet’s limits—though debate will no doubt continue on the best ways to implement that principle.
We’ve made this point for a long time – and will “sustain” it. We covered this in Green Project Management and we will continue this theme in Sustainability in Projects, Programs and Portfolios, our upcoming book to be published in 2015. The point: although it somehow now seems to be natural now to connect sustainability with politics, with culture, with social status, that’s simply not the case, nor has it ever been. Not only that, stamping sustainability with any other attributes or ‘brands’ besides concern for the long term is not productive for anyone. And that includes Mr. and Ms. Project Manager.
See how Caradonna responds when he is asked if sustainability is a ‘radical’ concept:
I would not say that the sustainability movement and its origins were radical. I would say in many ways they’re critical. They’re critical of deforestation, later on they’re critical of unchecked economic growth and deregulation, and they’re critical of pollution and social inequality. But in many ways, it’s quite conventional. I mean, one of the things I’ve noticed is that some of the early advocates for what we could call sustainable living were aristocratic bureaucrats, or imperialistic bureaucrats who are stationed on islands in the West Indies or the East Indies. Or someone like Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who’s part of the Saxon Dynasty, he’s part of the monarchy there. None of these people, as far as I can tell, are interested in the natural world, in and of itself. None of them. They’re interested in natural resources because they have an impact on the economy and they have an impact on the human realm, in one way or another....Perhaps counterintuitively, the sustainability movement has roots in good old-fashioned economic and monarchical self-interest.
And as we’ve said, project managers are about preserving precious resources ourselves. Granted, they may be the resources of our project, but if we can get ourselves to think a wee bit longer, the resources that the PRODUCT of our project will consume should also be of concern to us . It’s a valid idea – and this is a book worth adding to your project management (or just your general) bookshelf.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: December 07, 2014 09:30 PM |
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