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Aug 14, 2008
Sara Bio for Greenopolis.com
Sara Schley named the field of learning for sustainable enterprise in 1994. With partner Joe Laur, she then created Seed Systems, an international consulting company focused on creating organizations as living systems, so that all life can flourish for all time. Sara and Joe authored the initial works in the field, The Sustainability Challenge, (Pegasus, 1996) and then Creating Sustainable Organizations (Pegasus Communication, 1998) based on their corporate leadership program by the same name. Since then, Sara has worked creating, designing, facilitating and coaching leadership programs for sustainability for such companies as Nike, Plug Power, Shell Oil and many more. She is presently a consultant and mentor with the Harold Grinspoon Foundation.
With Seed Systems as incubator for innovation, Sara is the co-creator of the SoL Sustainability Consortium (www.solsustainability.org), a network of companies challenging each other to create best practices in the field; the Women Leading Sustainability Network (WLS), a dynamic circle of Women revolutionaries for sustainability; and Women in Power (www.womeninpowerprogram.org); an inspired women’s leadership initiation. Sara is a certified Shadow Work® facilitator and chant leader in the path of Rabbi Shefa Gold’s, “Kol Zimra.” Most recently, she is co-author of The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World; just out from Doubleday in June 2008. Her current book-in-progress is, The Future Comes Through Us: How Women-Centered Businesses are Changing the World. Sara lives with her husband Joe Laur and their twin first-graders, Maya and Sam, in the rural hills of Western Massachusetts.
“Mara and I are perfecting the art of living,” I tell my husband Joe. I am literally crunching granola as I speak. And I almost hugged a tree this morning. At least I hugged my butt to a south-facing icy rock. Soaking the surprisingly strong rays of a mid-February New England sunrise. Mara and I have just skied through the woods in to Wickett Pond, a mile long expanse of snow covered ice in this season. I checked the depth with my ski pole crunching through a hole left on the weekend by an ice fisherman. Looks to be about 18 inches thick. So you don’t have to worry about us falling through the ice -- you could drive a Mack truck over it.
The days are slowly getting longer and though the mercury says its 16 degrees, the sun is generously warm. Mara and I note that at seven weeks past solstice, the sun is as high as it is in late October. And despite the fact that my twin second graders reported that the ground hog did not see his shadow last week, we are gaining momentum on our inexorable march to spring. I imagine this same pond in summer, where we paddle canoes, pick berries and skinny dip in silky waters. But for now it looks like an ice cube with a layer of confection sugar sprinkled on top. Sweet like that too, is the feeling of gliding across it, heart and lungs pumping. We are part of the middle-age women’s husky club, a self – appointed band of die-hards who insist on getting out every day of the year, no matter what the weather. As our other husky mate Marilyn says, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad gear.”
Today I’m suited up in five layers on top -- silk turtleneck, polypro, fleece sweatshirt, windproof vest and jacket to keep the core warm – and after about four minutes of hard skiing am toasty. Lends a smug feeling of defying the elements. Winter can’t keep us down. About 20 minutes later, clear across the long narrow pond to the opposite side, we arrive at the sun-soaked south facing rock. I slept late this morning and, having to get the kids out to the bus, missed my morning practice of yoga and silence. I’ve learned I need that silence to ease my brain, and tune in to some deeper awareness. Anchor myself in gratitude first thing in the morning to set a context in which to place all the busy-ness of the day.
Luckily Mara knows this too and we have shared this ritual so many times before – the ski, the ray-soaking quiet, the writing that will follow – that we ease into it with few words. Just a smile of appreciation. I could have been spending this hour on interstate highway 91 at 75 miles per hour commuting to work in the city as I did this for the past two and a half years. So I am truly appreciative of the shift away from carbon footprint, and sitting, and traffic to exercise, wilderness and quiet. I know I am blessed to have the kind of work that allows me to earn my living from home via telecommute, teleconference, and the occasional flight to a city meeting.
This afternoon that work will include a two-hour teleconference with partners in Washington, DC in our co-creation, “The Green Planet Action Network.” We are working on systemic interventions to promote Food Security, Climate Change and Sustainable Livelihood. The work is intellectually demanding and I know that the physical, emotional and spiritual start to the day that I’ve just described is absolutely essential to my ability to maintain perspective, balance, creativity and perhaps even a dose of wisdom. We are talking about issues of environmental sustainability after all, and I’m the one who has had the privilege of starting my day in the wilderness – not in traffic – and gained an embodied sense of the qualities I want us to bring to our work. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Our Green Planet Action network seeks to create greater peace and prosperity, a healthier planet and people. I believe that work begins inside each of us. I know I’m at risk of sounding like a holier-than-thou preacher here. Trust me, I am far from perfect. Indeed it is my imperfections, vulnerabilities and proclivity towards dangerous degrees of emotional, psychological and physical imbalance that have taught me (after 50 turns round the sun) the need to be disciplined in practices that promote health and sanity. I’ve written in other places about “Sustainability: The Inner and Outer Work.” (Learning for Sustainability, SoL 2006; The Necessary Revolution, Doubleday 2008.) To take these reflections and turn them into action, we are creating the “8S path to sustainability.”
The 8Ss reflect a view that we can only create on the outside what we embody on the inside. You want peace, harmony and healing in the world? You’ve got some work to do – for as long as you have a pulse – inside yourself. The secret is that the “work,” over time, releases energy and joy and gratitude. So it’s really not work at all. But don’t tell anybody. Another secret: years ago while reading Paul Hawken’s, The Ecology of Commerce, I scribbled in the margins, “Spiritual Void leads to Consumption Addiction leads to Sustainability Crisis.” Now run that system in reverse: spiritual fulfillment leads to a sense of contentment without consuming an excess of stuff, leads to a world of abundance for all. How radical is that? Bring on the sustainability revolution by getting peaceful on the inside.
Why 8 Ss? I like the figure 8, the hour glass of it, because the image evokes the inner and outer work. If my friend Nancy Margulies, the brilliant illustrator can do this for me (I can’t draw beyond a stick), the picture of the 8 will be in dynamic flow from above to below, outer to inner. And it will be a marriage of a mirror image of two letter “Ss” one facing right joined to the one flipped and facing left; one dark and one light, merged. As it says in the poetic creation story of Genesis, “In the beginning the Source of All created dark and light, day and night.” Together they form a whole. Wondering what the 8 Ss are now? They are the Sacred, Seeing, Systems, Soul, Spirit, Shadow, Sabbath and Strategies. The Sacred, Soul, Spirit, Shadow and Sabbath are the disciplines of the inner work of sustainability. Seeing, Systems and Strategy are the disciplines of the outer work.
My teacher and friend Dawna Markova speaks of “life time practices.” Like breathing, like drinking water, like the laundry -- they don’t go away. As a student once asked architect and sustainability guru Bill McDonough, “How long is all this sustainability stuff gonna take anyway?” “Forever,” McDonough replied, “that’s the point.” This (book, chapter, course, blog) will now describe in some detail what I mean by each of the 8 Ss. I’ll give stories, teachers, examples and exercises for each. The goal is to make this an embodied practice for you. And me. So that we can all walk the walk of sustainability with more integrity, more wisdom, more humor, more joy. And, perhaps most importantly create the changes we want to see in the world.
How are Mara and I, as we teased Joe, “perfecting the art of living” with our morning ski, soak rays and write ritual? Hint: it’s got four of the eight Ss in it. I’ll shoot for the other four before bedtime. Want to hear how the first four showed up at Wickett Pond?
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Climate Computer Simulations lead to the Sacred. Can you spell “Einstein?”
(Part 2 continued from yesterday's post)
I thanked Dr. Beth Sawin for her phenomenal, groundbreaking work and for the integrity with which she conducts it. Here’s a woman to trust and I’m grateful that she is using her gifts so effectively, as she names it, on “Behalf of future generations." Yet as much as anything witnessing and participating in her climate simulation, I was struck by the sheer enormity, even impossibility of the situation. Even if all the players were to make herculean cuts in emissions that are much more radical than they’re now proposing, we’re looking at a 3, 4 or 6 degree centigrade rise in Global temperature by the year 2050. (By coincidence, that’s the year my twins will be 48, the age I am now. What legacy are we leaving them?) Scientists concur that if we can contain the rise in temperature to 2 degrees, we may be safe. Anything above that may be devastating for life as we know it. No one fully knows the impact, but we can presume that could mean millions or billions of people dying off from sea levels rising to flood coastal cities, massive drought to devastate food supply, wild fluctuations in weather patterns making the Tsunami of 2006 and Hurricane Katrina appear, species loss from habitat destruction, increase in violent conflict over increasingly scarce resources and on and on. We get the picture. It’s not pretty.
At the end of Beth’s presentation I hear myself saying, “It’s going to take a miracle.” Our mentor Dana Meadows and her co-authors warned us of this inevitability 39 years ago in their ground-breaking book Limits to Growth and again in its 1999 sequel, Beyond the Limits. But they were vilified by industry and ostracized as Cassandras. So we didn’t heed their call to stop our addiction to petroleum and start powering ourselves with the sun and its derivatives. And now we’re running out of time to shift trajectories that are speeding up and moving exponentially in the wrong direction. It’s going to take a miracle. Despite (or perhaps because of) her stellar credentials as a scientist Dana comes to pretty much to the same conclusion in the last Chapter, Chapter 8 of Beyond the Limits. It’s going to take a shift in consciousness in all of us to save our species and create a world that our children can thrive in. That’s why I asked if you can spell Einstein. He said, “A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty. . . ( Albert Einstein - The Merging of Spirit and Science)
All of the brilliant and visionary new energy technologies, all of the progressive policy, all of the new funding going to innovations in sustainability are absolutely essential to our survival. Yet they are not enough. We humans; all of us, you and me, Americans and Chinese, Brazilians and Indians, peoples spanning the Globe are going to have to wake up to the truth that we live or die together. That all life is a gift and all life is Sacred.
I’m looking out my window as I write this on an archetypal New England autumn day. The foliage is at its peak; blood reds, dark oranges, vibrant yellows. Rains have just cleared and winds are whipping through the canopy. With a touch of imagination, it is as if the trees are swaying with the breeze, dancing with each other, maple and birch and pine and oak and hemlock, each separate each completely connected. As I breathe out C02 from the respiration that keeps me cooking, they breathe in that C02 through photosynthesis, kindly sequestering from the atmosphere through their magic alchemistry with the sun, and turns what would be a global warming gas into the structures of wood and branches and leaves and fruits. Think about it. It is a miracle. As my friend Terri Nash says, only our brother plants can sit outside and soak lunch. We have to “buy” ours from them.
So my premise for this writing is that we environmental activists, soccer mothers, citizen shoppers, elected politicians, friends and neighbors and everyone have to treat that life as Sacred. The Earth is Sacred. All people are Sacred. And this moment is Sacred. We have to fall in love with Nature again, find our connection to land and sky, water and sun and literally re-member that our lives depend on these things. Get grateful. And then change. Everything. How we think, what we eat, where we travel, what we buy, how we engage with our neighbors, what our definition of success is, how much stuff is enough stuff, who we vote for, what we vote for, how we spend our time and how we give our love. What’s at risk? Life itself.
In Shadow Work www.shadowwork.com, a practice of healing and transformation the individual going through the process is asked to look at the pattern of her life. And if by her own definition it’s broken – for example she’s addicted to abusive men – her facilitator will gently guide her to take a hard look at how she’s created this pattern and how it’s lead to the dysfunction she experiences day to day. Then the facilitator asks, “How’s it working for you so far?” The answer, usually accompanied by a smile of recognition is, “Not very well.” The next question is, “Are you willing to take the risk to change it?” What’s at risk if she does and what’s at risk if she doesn’t?
To the inevitable cynics who’ll read this argument and scoff at getting in touch with the Sacred as a strategy for change, I ask, “How’s it working for us so far?” In other words, is not finding reverence for life getting us the results we want on the planet? Or is it possible that our lack of reverence for the gifts of the earth and each other are a root cause of the epidemics of hunger, disease, conflict, abuse, and atmosphere that is literally heating up? What’s at risk if we don’t change? We get more of the same. What’s at risk if we do change? Perhaps miracles could happen.
After a few decades of working for ecological sustainability armed with my MBA and training as an international corporate consultant, followed by honorable work convening multiple stakeholders from business, government and NGOs to look at global issues together, I’m convinced that we have to do something as radical as fall in love with Nature and each other and practice a sacred reverence for life.
Mind you this is not the same as religion. It is not about coercion or power over others or making somebody follow my prescription of what is holy. It does embrace an infinite diversity of spiritual and soul practices. But it says choose to practice, shift your orientation, walk your talk.
This blog, from here forward is going to feature 7 themes, the “7S path to sustainability for healing our selves and our world.” I’m all for the practical so in addition to conceptual frameworks and inspiring stories for each of the Ss we’ll explore practices to go with it that you can do. So you embody the change. And make choices for life as a result. Stay tuned for what the “Ss” are. . . .
