How Zen is Your Venn?

"We're captives of a business model that has passed its useful limits. [But] until there's a fundamental change in the underlying rules set, the model will keep yielding the same output." - George Ure

I've been thinking a lot lately of the diagram I saw in The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World by Peter Senge et al. In this book, Senge et al. present a sort of Venn diagram that exemplifies a way of looking at how economy, society, and the environment relate to each other that really resonates with me.

Source: "Visualizing Sustainability" at OppGreen Insights.

In this case, the economy is seen as part of society and not existing without it. Both operate within the natural systems and do not exist separate of the environment. It's a new way of thinking about how we treat our economy.  We tend if anything to see the world with economy and environment switched.

Today I thought of a new way of visualizing this model that really drives home the importance of the environment being the primary, foundational concern of our actions instead of the economy. Imagine the above diagram as stacked cylinders and we are looking down on them. Perhaps they are stacked so the environment, the widest of the cylinders, is at the top, like this:

 To me it seems like a rather precarious situation to prop everything up on the economy like this. One bad jolt can have them all on shaky ground. But if this model is inverted, like this:

This makes more sense to me. It seems like an arrangement like this, not just thinking of the environment as the all-encompassing domain but also as the foundation for all we do, we have a system that is not just more sustainable but also more hardy.

What are your thoughts? How do you visualize the relationship between environment, society, and economy?

Holiday Sustainability

"An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day." - Irv Kupcinet

This holiday season has been a little more tricky as we start living a more sustainable life. While we don't formally celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving for their intended purpose, we do take advantage of the times for family to gather and spend time together. It's rare that we get all or most of either of our families together in the same place at the same time, so we enjoy it however we can find it. Something we did years ago with Christmas was insist that we did not want any gifts. That was a difficult transition to make more for our family than for us, but it has worked out wonderfully.

This Thanksgiving was especially different for me as I'm trying to transition to a plant-based diet. My parents enjoy the traditional Thanksgiving spread, including the family recipe for pork stuffing. I admit I had some turkey and stuffing, though I tried to keep my portions down compared to previous years. In a way I knew I would never convince my family that we could do a vegetarian Thanksgiving, and the turkey and stuffing would have been there whether I ate it or not... yeah, slippery slope and not very committed I admit, but there it is.