Sustainability is about the world we share and not just the commitment we make to supporting a better environment. It is about what we do to sustain ourselves, our communities, our society, our culture, our institutions and our future.
Sustainability Time asks a central question about us: What is the natural thread that connects the many pieces of our civilization? Do we recognize what binds our challenges to a single frame?
Real life doesn't arrive in separate categories. Still, we attack our problems one by one and try to make a difference. We are resourceful and accomplish many of our goals in society. On the other hand, often, we diminish important parts of our problems as we try to solve them—and lose sight of what we are actually trying to fix.
We should always remember that people aren't simply consumers of resources. We are creators of value—and society's greatest resource. Economics, technology, government and natural resources matter, but so do compassion, creativity, integrity, experience, friendship, resilience, cooperation and time.
So, on this podcast, it is time for us to assess and tackle our goal: full sustainability and resilience—the things that ultimately matter.
Sustainability is about constructive vitality: developing healthier people, stronger relationships, resilient communities, responsible institutions and a natural world capable of supporting generations still to come. Resilience is all of this supported by continuity and stability, laying the groundwork for opportunity and quality of life for all—which is part of the fundamental value of sustainability itself.
There won't always be easy answers. We have unexpected tangents to follow. Tall cliffs to dive from. Walls to drive straight through without stopping. Ultimately, sustainability is about the air we'd like to breathe and the lives we'd like to live.
We have problems to wrestle with, and separate ideals and ideas to wrestle into one. This is part of life's journey. We must lead the way.
Proper valuation is the key to all things sustainable. Proper valuation is the freedom we keep in our hearts right now and the consciousness we care to share with others. As we learn to recognize our own value, the value of others and our place within the greater society, perhaps we move a little closer to becoming sustainable beings – supporting growth within humanity, supporting growth within ourselves.
Sustainability is love. Sustainability is life. Sustainability is one of the human race's most essential spiritual values.
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In this episode, we take sustainability out of the “environment-only” box and treat it as a way to evaluate the health of the larger society: people, communities, institutions, and the natural world. Real life doesn’t arrive in separate categories. We explore why sustainability can be the connecting thread across education, healthcare, economics, mental health, technology, culture, and public trust.
We also widen the definition of “resources” to include compassion, creativity, integrity, patience, friendship, experience, and cooperation. People aren’t merely consumers of resources; we are the chief resource, creating ideas, inventions, mentoring, art, and the social bonds that make resilience possible.
If you want a clearer, more human definition of sustainability and a more hopeful way to think about long-term progress, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with your own definition of “sustainability.”
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Sustainability Time Podcast. My name is Todd Francis. This is the podcast where we defy those who say that a mediocre future is all we should expect to have. We dare to defy the truth, dare to defy common logic. Sustainability can be a doorway to reevaluating what we actually need as individuals in a society and as a society. Too often, sustainability is understood primarily as a way to repair a damaged environment or preserve a healthy one. Wrong. It's about building a society that functions in ways that are enriching and that support growth for individuals, for communities, for institutions, and the natural world. Healthy, get this straight, get this right, my fellow human beings. A healthy and diverse natural environment is one of the consequences, natural consequences of a sustainable society. Healthy people, healthy cultures are better positioned, better positioned to care about their surroundings. Stronger communities are better positioned to protect what they value. A great many things are important to us as a community. Healthy institutions are better positioned to make thoughtful decisions that extend beyond the immediate pressures of life, of our survival. This means that sustainability helps us to look beyond dollars and cents or short-term necessities in ways that are vital, ways that can help us or maintain us as survivors. Money matters. Economics matter, but they are not the only measures of value available to us. We also have knowledge, creativity, relationships, compassion, experience, time, community, and our ability to cooperate. And perhaps most importantly, we have ourselves. People are not just consumers of society's resources. We are its chief resources, me and you and everyone else. Sustainability asks us to take all of those resources and make a new calculation. That calculation is how can we use what we have to build a society that is better suited for our individual and collective health, growth, and well-being. See, I'm not going to call this all an urgent crisis. Let's not do that. But I believe there is a persistent need for us to continue to continue moving towards a more sustainable world. We should strive to leave future generations with a world that is at least as healthy as the one we inherited. Think about our communities, our institutions, our opportunities, our knowledge, our relationships, and the values we pass on. Those are resources for us. And what an interesting topic we have, sustainability it is. And wonder what a wonderful journey we're going to take. I can't wait. I love the subject. So thank you for joining me.
Today I'd like to begin with a question for you. It's not a difficult question, it's not a political question, it's not an environmental question, just the question: what does the word sustainability mean to you? If you're like most people or many, your mind probably goes immediately to the environment. You might think of recycling, protecting wildlife, renewable energy, climate, cleaner oceans, cleaner air, or preserving forests? Important work. We need to continue to make progress in every one of these areas. But have we placed sustainability into a small box now? What if sustainability isn't one issue among many? What if it is a thread that quietly connects nearly all of our issues, from politics to environment to the soup to the Super Bowl and literacy?
One of the fascinating things about human beings is that we naturally assign value to things. We decide what deserves attention. We decide what deserves our time, our money, what preserves our protection, certainly. Sometimes we make decisions consciously. Sometimes we don't even realize that we're making them. But every decision reflects a value. Every budget, every calendar. Every institution reflects a value, every community reflects one. Friendships do as well. If sustainability is about anything, I think it begins with learning to recognize the values that quietly shape the world around us. Think about a garden. People admire a beautiful garden, but few people may admire what the value of the garden actually is. No, nope, hold on. Flowers are visible, we enjoy them, they're life giving. We understand a lot of the things that go into making a garden healthy. But do we think clear enough that they are expressions from other people there for you to enjoy? The point is to understand that there is someone who is out there who wants to share their beauty, to beautify our living environment, to touch your spirit. That's what's in the garden. That's what's there at all times to form a bond between you and the gardener. No different than music. It's all of the people who admire the garden. The gardener forms a bond with. Certainly a garden.
So one reason I wanted to create this podcast is because I think we often divide the world into separate conversations. We have education, healthcare, economics, mental health, politics, the environment, technology, and culture, many, many, many, many sides. Each discussion develops its own vocabulary and priorities. Yet our lives don't work that way. A child doesn't experience education separately from family. A family doesn't experience economics separately from health. A community doesn't experience public safety from trust. Everything influences everything else. So sustainability offers us a way to reconnect those conversations. We don't pretend that every problem has a solution, but we ask a common question from all of these areas. Do our conversations create condition in which people, communities, institutions, and the natural world can remain healthy enough to continue growing as we're speaking. Are we heading that direction? It should give us a larger opportunity to have a shared beginning. Our lives are interconnected. Perhaps our understanding of society should be interconnected as well. One of the things that excites me most about sustainability is that it invites curiosity. It challenges us to think about ourselves, nature, and all of the manifestations of our capabilities as humans. I'd say that sustainable thinking is the beginning of a greater wisdom. So throughout this podcast, I hope we will remain excited by the infinite range of ideas and concepts that our mind can create. And the many environments we can consider that can go along with them. Sustainability, it offers us an amazing opportunity to keep learning. Hallelujah! And learning may be one of the most sustainable habits a society can cultivate. Perhaps this is a good place to pause and ask another question.
If sustainability is really about creating the conditions that allow healthy things to continue growing, what are those conditions? So what produces those conditions? Our resources, technology, infrastructure, ourselves, again, we have the greatest resource of all, natural resources, financial resources, educational resources, scientific resources, cousin to technology. And those are easy to recognize because we can offer measure them. But there are other primary resources that don't fit neatly into our spreadsheet. Is compassion a resource? Is creativity a resource? How about experience? How about friendship? How about integrity? How about patience? These are important resources too in society. History suggests that they may be among the most valuable resources a society possesses. Think about it. They don't appear in quarterly reports, yet communities rise and fall depending upon them. Let's not forget that. One of the ideas we'll return to often is that people themselves may be society's greatest resource. Every invention, every work of art, every scientific discovery, every charitable organization, every hospital, every school, every successful business, every business attempt, every conservation effort, every act of kindness is a sustainable act because it supports and binds and guides us. Sometimes we talk about human beings primarily as consumers of resources. Perhaps we should spend more time thinking about people as creators of resources. Because that is one of the most remarkable things human beings do. We create possibilities. A good idea inspires another. One invention leads to ten more. One volunteer inspires a second volunteer. One teacher changes the direction of a student's life. These are renewable resources in the deepest of in the deepest of senses, not because they replenish automatically, but because they grow through participation.
This way of thinking also changes how we see institutions. Sometimes we speak about institutions as though they are separate from people. They're not. Schools are people, hospitals are people, businesses are people, governments are people, nonprofit organizations are people, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, community centers. Institutions ultimately rise and fall because of the people within them. Yes? But that realization is encouraging. Because the important question is not whether the institutions are perfect, the important question is whether they continue moving towards health. Healthy public dialogue, education, healthy economics, healthy economics, healthy ecosystems. So health is not the absence of difficulty, hardship, or conflict, it is the ability to adapt, grow, recover, and change. This is resilience. This is one of the most important parts of sustainability.
A word about environmentalism now. Sustainability really another word for environmentalism? As I've said before many times, and I hope we'll say again the answer is no. Now imagine a society filled with people who value learning, cooperation, value stewardship, value responsibility, creativity, long term thinking, and each other. And each other. Say it again. Would this be a society more likely to protect its forests, its rivers, its wildlife? Yes, I believe is that answer. Fully, completely, obviously so. Sustainability is not asking us to think less about the environment. It's asking us to think more completely about everything that influences it. And isn't that a beautiful thing? It is a beautiful thing. So with that would come, that would bring us to understand something. If all of this is true, we've talked about so far, then sustainability, it's not a single discipline. And at the same time, it is an approach, it is an approach that affects it affects our proper valuation of society. And that's wonderful. That's exciting, with interesting dimensions. Proper evaluation of things around us. It's a brand new world.
None of us creates language or music or science or democracy or public libraries or hospitals or parks. We inherited these things. Someone before us devoted time, imagination, sacrifice, hopes and dreams so that we could benefit from their work. Now it's our turn to improve everything where we can, to repair what we should, what we can, to create where something new is needed. This is our challenge. This is our responsibility. Some of the healthiest ecosystems develop over generations. Human society may not be very different. Trust goes slowly. Trust grows slowly, wisdom grows slowly, character grows slowly. Healthy institutions usually do grow slowly. Perhaps sustainability asks us to become a little more patient with growth that cannot be rushed. We work to find a healthy society where the momentum is taking us the right direction, taking us to the direction where we can say the future looks bright. Sometimes progress is simply a community becoming a little kinder. A school helping one more student to graduate. A business deciding to invest in its people. That idea gives me hope because it means sustainability isn't reserved for the expert, it's not reserved for tomorrow. It belongs to all of us. Each of us has different gifts, different opportunities, different responsibilities. But every one of us participates in shaping the culture around us. Every conversation leaves something bonding and structuring in a sustainable world. Sustainability begins a movement. We become its consciousness and its influence. The moment we recognize our smallest actions are not isolated events, but are part of a larger story that is being developed all the time. Healthy families, healthy communities, healthy institutions, healthy cultures, none of these exist in isolation. Each influences the other. Each depends in some measure upon the health of the whole. One of the most remarkable things about human beings is that we live in more than one moment at a time. A conversation, a decision, a vote, a lesson, a new idea. An afternoon spent at home with someone else. An opportunity to mentor, a willingness to apologize, a commitment to the truth, small moments, small choices, small journeys. All of these are with you in this moment right now. Our values, our habits, our wisdom, our mistakes. We have inherited this world, and we will help to pass it on in a healthier state than we have received
it. Positivity. So before I go, I'd like to thank you and say thank you. Not just for listening, but for sharing these few moments and considering something very important. We need to have it here to stay, develop, grow, become real. Not moderated by consumerism, not matter, not moderated by common speak. We have to grab it by the reins, make it real. As we know, there are countless there are countless ways to spend 20 minutes, and I'm honored that you've chosen to spend some of it with me on sustainability time. I hope something from today's conversation stays with you. Something that builds sustainability and resilience in our wonderful world today. So wherever you are, I hope that you're having a glorious week, a peaceful week. I'm Todd Francis. I'll see you next time on Sustainability Time.
