How could you have a "sustainability plan?" Isn't the idea of sustainability that everything you do is part of a system that is consciously making the world better than you found it? Does it have to be conscious? Can you have a plan to seek something that keeps changing as the system around your organization keeps evolving? I can understand having a set of sustainability performance metrics and measuring them and tracking your progress on them. But, isn't sustainability the ultimate "wicked problem" that can never be tamed into a structured plan, because as soon as you try, the stakeholders change, their interests change, and your options change? In a plan you have objectives and alternatives for action that you evaluate based on criteria for meeting your objectives. With sustainability, there is no such thing as "good enough." You are in a constant dance with everyone else about what you are willing to do and what they are willing to do, and it keeps changing. I defy you to "plan" that. The result would be people "declaring victory" because they could say they "achieved their plan" even though there may be no evidence that as a result the system is any more or less sustainable, because their plan took no responsibility for the larger system, only their particular role in it, which may or may not have led to greater sysem sustainability.
We have a case here of our eyes being bigger than our stomachs. We can understand an abstract concept of sustainability, and of systems, and we can use the resulting logical structures to change our behaviors to "move towards sustainability". But we don't have a world government that is taking responsibility for global sustainability (and there is no other kind that has true meaning). We don't have global taxes, and global representation on global priority-setting bodies (OK, other than fees we pay to the UN for things like www.MAWEB.org.
I would like to see a series of charts that show the contribution of my local community to the various metrics of global sustainability, both positive and negative. This would help us prioritize which aspects of sustainability make the most sense to spend time and money on at the local level, in the hopes that somehow our local actions would matter to the global system. We could use the way that we become conscious and make conscious decisions as an example to others, as well as find out what others are doing in this regard and follow their examples. But I can't tell you who the "we" is in this story. We are left with each person, each organization trying to make up their own "sustainability plan" and convincing themselves that it isn't a complete oxymoron.
In the meantime I will continue to search for understanding about how to show these ideas visually. Let me know if you have suggestions!
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