Spencer B. Beebe, founder and president of Ecotrust as well as the founding president of Conservation International, published an opinion piece in Sustainable Business Oregon titled “It’s Time to Ditch Sustainability” that argues that “sustainability” has been co-opted and is an impediment to real change.
Beebe writes “Today we waste far too much precious hope, time and energy waiting for traditional institutions of government and large corporations to solve our fundamental problems. Why wait on national political solutions when there is so much good work to be done at home? A truly adaptive, resilient, and more natural form of development comes most easily from the very intimate relationships between people and place.
With rights to more opportunity and a better life naturally come responsibilities. In the face of a changing and unpredictable world, in a nation in which national debt is growing at twice the rate of our most optimistic projection of growth, local and regional enterprise is a scale and framework in which we can most effectively create jobs, not find them, and take matters back into our own hands. Restoring faith and trust in country might come less from sustaining existing institutions than from private initiative, from the bottom up, naturally.”
