Seeing the Forest for the Trees

My old iPod wallpaper

I recently changed the wallpaper background photo on my iPod from the supplied ‘planet earth viewed from space’ to the close up of aspen tree trunks in a forest glen ablaze in fall foliage. Arguably this is evidence of the arcane information people put on their blogs. But for me it provided a new perspective on ‘sustainable development’.

My new iPod wallpaper 

I was asked to give a talk on the ‘big picture’ of sustainable development at the last Globe Forum in Stockholm. I started the talk with Chief Seattle’s oft-referenced – “Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.”  Any seasoned sustainable development practitioner should be able to recite this by heart. On the agenda I spoke after a First Nations leader of the Iroquois Tribe. I hadn’t used the quote in years but it seemed like an opportune time; however it’s not a typical ‘Bank’ quote.

For me this was coming full circle as I had used the Chief Seattle quote at my first public speech back in 1987. I had just read ‘Our Common Future’, and was full of vim and vigor trying to implement the ideas of the report as the City of Guelph’s Waste Management Coordinator. ‘Save the planet; start by recycling that bottle and newspaper in your Blue Box’, was my mantra. Just by taking better care of our garbage we could strengthen the web of life and get on with sustainable development, I argued.


I now work in the World Bank’s Sustainable Development Network. And the World Bank is arguably one of the world’s most powerful proponents of sustainable development. Yet I felt uneasy giving that speech in Stockholm. The world’s progress toward sustainable development over the past two decades is modest at best. What happened over those twenty-three years between speeches?

I wondered why our progress has been so slow. I think it might be because we start addressing problems at too macro a scale. An institutional protocol perhaps, or a sweeping new law, a new ‘green agenda’, an accord or tax; and then the grand ideas and plans are nibbled away by personal and parochial interests.

If all politics is local, then maybe all action needs to start locally.

The biggest threats to sustainability are ‘fractors’. These are the manifestations of our insecurities, our need to fracture plans, and champion our personal, corporate, and national objectives. And then there’s the relentless law of entropy. Things fall apart if they are not nurtured. Sustainable development needs much less fractious geopolitics and much more ‘biopolitics’, working with the biosphere, with each other.

Maybe planet earth viewed from space gives us comfort in how things should be; how we intuitively know right from wrong. From far enough away the fractures aren’t even visible. From space we can almost make out the hurricanes and oil slicks, but we distance ourselves from the slums, the missing tigers, the 25,000 children that died yesterday from lack of simple basic services. We often fail to see the immediate opportunity in our empathy and goodwill.

After twenty-three years since ‘Our Common Future’ was released, our common future is no more promising.  We think sustainable development is a big picture issue and the solution will arrive some day. We are like a John Frum Cargo Cult but waiting for ‘enlightenment’ rather than ‘stuff’.

Maybe we need to stop waiting and try another perspective. Our common future is now happening in our common cities.

Climate change for example is one of those things that can’t be solved by individuals in isolation. So we look for big solutions and accords between countries. But the challenge goes beyond science, nations and grand plans. Maybe the ‘sweet spot’ for true sustainable development really is the neighborhood.  Maybe cities, like forests, are a scale that makes it possible to see the forest, and act today. Save the planet, help a slum; and keep recycling. Your city needs you.

Sure, we need to keep global challenges in the back of our mind. However, in order to act with impact we need to work at the scale where the fractures start and new linkages grow; ecosystem, slum, neighborhood, city, forest glen.