A New Psychology for Sustainability Leadership

The Hidden Power of Ecological Worldviews

Steve Schein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783531905
• eBook ISBN: 9781351286022
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

During the last decade, the sustainability position in multinational corporations has grown in influence. Much literature has explored how corporations can play an important role in solving the environmental challenges facing the planet. However, until now, there has been little research on sustainability leadership at the individual level. In this book, Schein explores the deeper psychological motivations of sustainability leaders.

He shows how these motivations relate to overall effectiveness and capacity to lead transformational change and he explores the ways in which the complexity of sustainability is driving new approaches to leadership.Drawing on interviews with 75 leaders from over 40 multinational corporations and NGOs, Schein explores how ecological worldviews are developed and expressed in global sustainability practice. By applying key theories from developmental psychology, integral ecology and eco-psychology to sustainability practice, Schein encourages us to think about leadership in a different way.

A New Psychology for Sustainability Leadership will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience of social scientists, educators, corporate executives, and social entrepreneurs. The insights from this book can be usefully integrated into leadership curriculum and development programs to help the next generation of leaders respond to global challenges.

Part 1:
Introduction

Sustainability is both a badly misused and abused term.

John Ehrenfeld

1
Ecologically awake

The roots of this book are in the garden. It was there, ten summers ago, where the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystems we depend on for life first became clear. At the age of 45, this realization, and its implications for business, came as a shock.

It started in the spring of 2006, when I became steward of a ten-acre piece of land in the hills above the town of Ashland, Oregon. The land was north facing and densely forested with a mix of ponderosa trees, black oaks, Douglas firs, and western red cedars. Underneath the canopy of trees grew a thick carpet of native grasses, manzanita and wild rosebushes.

The mosaic of the forest made me deeply curious about the landscape around me. What was the history of this land? Why were certain trees healthier than others? Where was water flowing beneath the forest floor? How was the microclimate changing? These types of questions led me to a series of environmental science teachers that started with an off-the-grid ethno-botanist and permaculture⁵ teacher named Tom Ward. I first met Tom in the old oak grove at the bottom of my property. He wasted no time in beginning my full-immersion course of applied environmental studies.

He started with fire ecology and ethno-botany, the study of relationships between human beings and plants, a field that can be traced back to Pythagoras in the sixth century BC. In the weeks that followed, Tom taught me how to create a perennial food forest and how to build topsoil through cover crops and composting. He showed me how to bring the bees through continuous pollination and support beneficial insects through discontinuous planting patterns.

Tom explained how perennial polyculture and biodiversity create resilience. He described closed-loop systems, waste repurposing, and how to catch rainwater by building bioswales and small ponds across the land. He explained the historical role of fire in the ecology of the forest. More than through his words, Tom powerfully role modelled how to observe nature closely every day and live more lightly on the Earth.

Later that winter, when the fall rains softened the clay baked hard by the summer heat, we began to survey and dig a series of trails snaking up the hillside through the trees. We used a large supply of partially burnt logs found scattered in the forest to create earthen berms on the downhill side of the trails, using the wet clay to sculpt the trails like cement provided courtesy of nature.

In spring we dug postholes and built a deer fence around one acre for the garden. We created a network of drainage swales and ponds designed to hold water along the hillside and down in the garden during the rainy season. With the help of several friends, we thinned the densely covered forest, felling hundreds of small diameter ponderosa trees, using draw-knives to peel the bark, and piling the beautiful yellow logs in crisscrossed log decks that resembled rafts.

The following summer we dug test pits and took soil samples of clay and sandstone. We unearthed dozens of large boulders and slabs of sandstone covered with shell fossils, which came from an ancient geological formation when the entire area was covered by ocean.

We found many uses for these stones, from foundations for a greenhouse in the garden, to retaining walls and stepping stones. These fossilized rocks spoke of a time when the valley was covered by sea. They provided hard evidence of geological time.

A big part of those first summers on the land involved learning how to grow food based on principles of permaculture and organic farming. This led to a realization about our industrial food system and the inescapable environmental implications for the planet. Along with Tom’s hands-on permaculture teachings, there were several books and articles that completely changed the way I thought about food. First, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by food writer Michael Pollan explained how our industrial food system was leading to massive soil erosion, vanishing species, the obesity epidemic and a host of other health and economic problems.⁶

Next, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her husband, Steven Hopp, an environmental studies professor, described the full long-term implications of large-scale industrial, genetically modified and petroleum-driven agriculture. They explained how, through the oil and natural gas consumed by the machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, processing and transportation of large-scale corporate agriculture, we Americans put almost as much oil into our stomachs as into our cars. In fact, Americans consume more than 400 gallons of oil per year per citizen, or almost 20% of our nation’s energy use.⁷

Most importantly, a global systems perspective of the Earth’s ecological crisis was provided in Plan B, the comprehensive assessment of the Earth’s natural resources by Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute.⁸ As one of the world’s most influential environmental thinkers, Brown has been synthesizing and communicating the large-scale environmental trends and their implications throughout the world for more than 50 years. In Plan B, Brown and his team of researchers present the environmental data, ecosystem by ecosystem, from rising temperatures and sea levels, to melting ice caps and deforestation, to eroding soil and falling water tables. Most disturbingly, they describe how growing food and water shortages are contributing to the increasing political instability we’re seeing around the world.

A few summers later, a large wildfire broke out less than a half-mile east of my land. As my friend Aaren and I raced around the perimeter of the house cutting down dozens of ponderosa trees, helicopters and planes loaded with fire retardant flew directly over our heads making laps, dropping their loads on the fire. My adrenalin was flowing, my heart was racing, and large clouds of billowing black smoke filled the sky and blocked out the sun, adding to the surreal scene.

The wildfire turned out to be the last of that summer’s fire season. While it did burn over 200 acres including one occupied home, it never crossed the road to directly threaten our house. However, in its aftermath, something interesting occurred in the forest at the top of the hill on our land.

The following winter, the evergreen needles of hundreds of ponderosa trees turned brown all at once and started dying from the top down. A local arborist helped me identify this phenomenon as the handiwork of the California pine beetle, otherwise known as Ips paraconfusus.⁹ Evidently, large swarms of these beetles were flushed out of the forest across the road during the previous summer’s forest fire. They then flew west and landed in the trees on my land. Once there, they began to bore holes in the bark, a process that eventually strangles each tree and prevents it from being able to suck water up through its roots to the crown.

These experiences allowed me to comprehend more of the complexity of the natural environment that surrounds us, what physicist and systems thinker Fritjof Capra calls the “web of life”.¹⁰ It made me more aware of how much I had taken for granted about Earth’s ecosystems and how far out of balance we had become as a global society. It gave me a glimpse of what changes in these systems could mean for the future of this land and, on a much, much larger scale, for the future of all people.

These experiences made me more aware of how much I had taken for granted about Earth’s ecosystems

It also made me painfully aware of how much I had missed during my own business school education and during my subsequent corporate career as the president and co-founder of several companies, the last of which became a public company in 1998.

In 2005, I left the corporate world to join the faculty of a university business school. This career shift, which coincided with my move to the land, provided me with an opportunity to apply ecological awareness to business education.

1.1 A higher purpose for business

During the first few years I taught courses that were part of the standard curriculum. These included courses on strategic management, organizational leadership and business ethics. However, in the fall of 2007 a pivotal conversation with a friend led me to attend the Bioneers conference in San Rafael, California. Founded more than 25 years ago by Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simmons, Bioneers is one of the first annual conferences that bring together environmental, social justice and corporate responsibility activists under one roof. Based on principles of biological and cultural diversity and biomimicry, the annual event has inspired an entire generation of sustainability leaders.¹¹

My experience at the conference led to a second fundamental truth about sustainability: the interdependence between big business, healthy ecosystems and basic human rights. This is especially important to understand in regards to multinational corporations and their environmental impacts on developing countries around the world where much of their raw materials are sourced and their products are manufactured.

As a recent graduate from the Presidio Green MBA programme in San Francisco, my friend had his finger on the pulse of the latest sustainability trends. When he invited me I was in the middle of teaching three fall semester classes, and attending this conference had not been in my plans. It was also my eldest daughter Casey’s 17th birthday and we had plans to celebrate at home with our family. However, when I told her about the conference, she looked me in the eye and said, “You have to attend this conference, and I’ll come with you!”

From the first presentation I found myself thinking, if only this information could be a standard part of the business curriculum, if only these types of presentations could be offered on a broader scale at business schools, if only …

At Bioneers, I listened to paradigm-shifting talks about biomimicry by Janine Benyus, ecological literacy by David Orr, natural capitalism by Paul Hawken, the mycelial web by Paul Stamets, food policy by Michael Pollan, and indigenous rights by Agnes Baker Pilgrim and the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers.

At Bioneers, I listened to paradigm-shifting talks about biomimicry, ecological literacy, natural capitalism, the mycelial web, food policy and indigenous rights

However, there was one individual who I met at the conference who made the biggest impression on me. His name was Ray Anderson and, until his death in 2011, he was the CEO of Interface, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of commercial modular carpet. He was the first CEO of a multinational public company to put a stake in the ground for a zero ecological footprint and adopt a “do no harm to the Earth” policy in a large-scale industrial company. Since the mid-1990s, he had been working tirelessly to help the business world and corporate leaders everywhere fully understand the environmental realities of our planet and the responsibility of big business.

In thousands of speeches, Anderson continually pointed out that business is the most pervasive and powerful institution on the planet and responsible for most of the damage done to the Earth’s ecosystems.

He made a powerful argument that business must take the lead towards sustainability and restoration. Anderson also highlighted that one of the biggest things that need to change is the education system, and observed that universities everywhere are still teaching a system that is destroying the biosphere.¹²

Ray Anderson acted as a powerful role model by articulating the fundamental responsibility of multinational corporations

Ray Anderson acted as a powerful role model for what sustainability leadership looks like at the CEO level, by articulating the fundamental responsibility of multinational corporations to lead the way in a transformation of our globalized economic system towards more sustainable world. Beginning in 1994, his company pioneered many of the innovative sustainability strategies that were to become more common in the two decades that followed. He was guided by a deep sense that there is no bigger issue for a company than its ultimate purpose and challenged us to understand that business must exist for a higher and nobler purpose than just making a profit.

Much has been written about Ray Anderson and I won’t say more here, other than that the short conversation I had with him seven years ago led to the next epiphany for me. I grasped the truth of the ecological crisis and the implications for business. It was at that moment that I decided to join the sustainability movement dedicated to transforming business in service of social and ecological justice.

1.2 Sustainability curriculum 1.0

My idea was simple: I wanted to get environmental studies and business students in the same room

After returning from the Bioneers conference, I started a new sustainability leadership programme at the university. On one level, my idea was simple: I wanted to get environmental studies and business students in the same room. I felt that by creating new opportunities for students from these two separate schools to come together more frequently, they could greatly enhance each other’s education. However, based on the long tradition of organizing universities into separate disciplinary silos, students from these two schools did not have many opportunities to study together. I believed strongly that, in order to prepare the next generation of business leaders for future ecological challenges, they needed to have more environmental science in their curriculum.

Using principles of permaculture and natural capitalism as an initial teaching framework, I created two new sustainability-related courses for business students. Closed loops, service and flow, radical resource productivity, natural building, resilience, repurposing waste, and restoration—all principles of permaculture and natural capitalism—translated into the many ways that sustainability was beginning to be put into practice by multinational corporations.

Principles of permaculture and natural capitalism translated into the many ways that sustainability was put into practice by multinational corporations

The first course focused on the latest sustainability in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figure
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Exploring the corporate eco-psyche
• Part 3: How sustainability leaders think
• Part 4: The future of sustainability leadership
• Appendix A: Ecological Sustainability Worldview Assessment Tool (E-SWAT)
• Appendix B: Research methodology and description of participants
• Notes
• References
• About the author