Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Michael Crow: Thank you Rob and thank you everyone for taking time out of your busy schedule to help us to recognize a fantastic achievement. We sometimes have events at the University that we call VIVA Events. We had one the other day. Two of our students won the national championship in their particular events in track and field, which is a significant achievement in a country as large and as diverse as this one is. So we recognize them.

We've been wanting to recognize Sander for the last couple months since his award and so we decided to have this event. Those of you that have been invited to this event are either members of the Global Institute of Sustainability Board, staff the Global Institute of Sustainability, or a faculty member or a staff person somehow attached to activities related to climate.

Let me start by just asking our Global Institute of Sustainability Board members to stand so that the rest of us can recognize them and just thank you very much for your participation. It's also an honor that we have two of our most significant donor families represented here, Julie Wrigley and Melanie and Rob Walton. If you guys could stand and just be recognized also for your significant contributions to the institute.

It really is the case that the way that we are evolving the model for this institute is that it's atypical. It's not a small group of faculty members trying to do great things and achieve hero status by what they do. We have lots of room for that within the University. This is a large group of faculty members, more than 200 are involved, more than 250 actually are involved with this institute in one way or another and at some point that number might be 300 or 350 or it might be what we do at ASU plus what goes on at 10 other places, meaning this is not a static model.

At the end of the day though, this enterprise is very much driven by intellectual energy and Sander Van der Leeuw who came to this institution a few years ago has provided us two monumental contributions of his intellectual energy. First, he was the designer and architect of our new School of Human Evolution and Social Change, which before I even met him I read this document that a guy named Van der Leeuw had written.

It was an idea about what this school might do. I said, "I don’t know who this is, but this is who we're hiring." I don’t know if you remember that Sander. I said, "Anyone that could write this and think about this is a person who has an unbelievably agile mind, an unbelievably capable mind, to take his training in archeology and history and to take his specialization in the Mediterranean Region and to take his ability to move through time to look backward into cultures, to look present into cultures, to look forward into cultures, and from that to gain insight and perspective and then from that to design a school.

Alex, you probably don't know exactly how I view your school, but I view it kinda like a time machine. It's a group of academics who can go very far all the way back to as far as we can think, who can speculate about the future in ways that other schools can't speculate, and who can actually give us some meaningful understanding of the present and where we are. It's all ultimately linked to where we came from. Sander was able to conceptualize that.

Then in two other ways he has played a major role in the moving of this university forward. First, by taking a leadership role and a design role first as a board member/faculty member, then as an architect designer, and ultimately as Dean of the School of Sustainability he has helped us to launch this school very successfully. It's very difficult.

Very few people of the academics that are here even know how the school they went to to get their PhD was created. Who did it? How was it created? How was it oriented? Here we actually have the folks still alive that were involved in creating schools and moving them forward. Sander has really been involved in the creation of two of ASU's transdisciplinary schools, two of our models for intellectual fusion. He's even now, while he's in the midst of being the dean, working on yet a third project which is our complex adaptive systems, what we now call Network, our complex adaptive systems network, which is how do you take all of those things that thwart us, that are beyond our ability to simply solve, and how do you embrace complexity, understand complexity, and derive solutions from understanding complexity in new and robust ways. His intellect is also now involved in yet a third venture at the University and he's doing very well at that.

Then, oh by the way, along the way the United Nations declares him Champion of the Earth and we're like, "Well that's pretty cool. Champion of the Earth." We thought that merited at least getting everybody together to have some chicken. So here we are and we wanted to wait until we had the Global Institute of Sustainability board meeting. We have a short video that's been put together I think by the UN folks and edited by the ASU folks or just the UN folks? So you don't have to worry about the black helicopters or anything like that. We've looked at it and it's safe. You all don't deal with the legislature quite like I do. The video will cue now.

[Video playing]

This is very different, these ceremonies in Brazil. I'm gonna have to rethink our Regents Professors Ceremonies and those academic presidents, the two women that were speaking, what universities are they? He thinks one might be a fashion model. I’m not sure. Oh Tom Brady's wife? I thought someone was joking when they told me that.

Sander, I'd like you to come up because—Sander's, by the way is going to give us a short talk on where we're thinking in terms of some of the things that we're thinking about in terms of climate moving forward. Sander, the University has gotten something for you over here. You're gonna help me pull off this black cover. In recognition of your Champion of the Earth Award, we thought that this little Earth might be kind of nice.

Sander Van der Leeuw:That is amazing. That is absolutely astonishing. Thank you.

Michael Crow: It says on this little plaque, "For Sander Van der Leeuw, Champion of the Earth, Interpreter of the past, Our esteemed colleague, given to you on October 2, 2012." We just want to congratulate you on your recognition.

Sander Van der Leeuw: Thank you. Before I want to get to the point that is my presentation, I'd like to take this occasion to thank, from the bottom of my heart, all of you who have taken the time to join me for this lunch. The members of the GIOS board and in particular the three co-chairs, Michael, Julie Wrigley, and Rob Alton, who have each encouraged me and given me support at critical moments in the trajectory that led to this moment, my colleagues in GIOS and SOS, which is the abbreviations for the School of Sustainability, and in particular Rick Shangraw, Rob Melnick, Patricia Reiter, Chris Boone, Meredith Simpson, Trisha Yasolsky, and the others with whom I know lead my daily life. Also, the close colleagues in SHESC who were and are still so important to me and the dedicated and wonderful staff of both units. My friend, colleague and partner in this adventure [Inaudible], who supported, enabled, and inspired me to follow the track that ultimately lead to this event through three lives and many trips. And then finally colleagues in so many disciplines as you all sit here across all campuses, but in particular of course, our little northwest corner of the Tempe campus with all the schools that I've been so closely involved with.

As you have just seen I have been honored in a distant place at a time in early June that is rapidly fading into the past. As I mentioned then, I was humbled, honored, but also a little proud. I'm human after all. This ceremony is in many ways more important to me. Because of your presence, you the people I work with on a daily basis, who keep inspiring me and stimulating me to try and lead them and respond to their needs, and who have come together to celebrate today.

What is my research all about? I was given this prize for two projects. One, a 10 year project on sustainability challenges in all of the southern European countries that I lead with a team of 60 scientists all through the 1990s. Then secondly, a project that I did while I was sort of on my way to here, but which started in Europe on innovation. In both cases, I've been trying to apply what is commonly called a complex adaptive systems perspective to those kinds of issues.

What is the research all about? The first of these two topics, sustainability, let us quickly abandon the idea that environmental change was about the environment. What happened is in the first weeks of the project in Greece, we were asking people, because that was the topic of the project, what about environmental degradation? They didn't understand what we were saying.

We ultimately, after a few weeks of experimenting, took a family out into their own backyard where there was a hole of about 20 yards across and 3 yards deep due to solar flexion, natural degradation. We asked them, "Is that degradation?" "Oh no, nothing of the sort. We've lived with this for all our lives." "What is degradation?" we asked. They said, "You know, the fact that there are now trees growing on the mountains."

That made very clear to us from the start that the perception of degradation is actually culturally determined. What these people were saying is that since the Second World War their society, their culture, had disintegrated. They associated that with this particular phenomenon of trees growing on the hills. I can't get into all the details, but it shows you how working in a different culture, and we have been talking a lot this morning about global issues, is actually of importance to begin to realize the blinkers we have on ourselves.

The second topic, innovation, to put it briefly concerns the fact that when we talk about sustainability we think that we can innovate our way out of it or at least that's what lot of people tell us. Turns out that we then forget that innovation for two and a half centuries has actually got us into it in the first place. I will elaborate in the rest of my talk, which is on the PowerPoint, a little bit what I think about that whole phenomenon. It's very clear that if we want to innovate our way out of sustainability challenges, we need to innovate differently and very differently.

A last element that I want to bring is that no institution, no authority, no government can bring the change of mind around that we need. They cannot do that single handedly. That can only come through collective action, by everybody together. In Rio, I dedicated this prize to the next generation. The next generation of countries, developing countries, the next generation of people, the young people of today, the generation that is beginning to so proudly transform our world that I have already difficulty recognizing it.

A generation that truly sees sustainability as a societal challenge it is rather than solely as an environmental one. A challenge of equity, education, development, and above all commitment to doing things differently collectively. A generation that aims to transform our society into a truly open system where all countries, people, and institutions accept the challenge to interact and together design a more appropriate society, a sustainable world. A generation that we all need to trust and for the moment we can only wish it well.

Let me now get to the more scientific part of this moment. I need to warn people because there's here two completely different audiences. There is the board with whom we talk in depth over the last couple of days on sustainability issues. There is a much wider community of scientists and I am going to try and skate between the two, but if at one point you hear things that you've heard already, please bear with me for a little while.

How did this come about? About four or five years ago at a conference that we had organized in Germany, I got this phone call from somebody who was attending a board meeting of that particular organization. The person simply asked, "How is it possible that after 25 years of research, media and so on and so forth, we still don't have the collective action that we actually need to have in this domain? What has prevented a grand swell, a rapid transition to sustainability?"

What we started working on over the last couple of years is indeed on the one hand research that particular topic as a social science issue. On the other hand, try and come up with some questions that can be put to the outside world and that concern the outside world and to see whether we could actually begin to help a little bit on that.

One of the questions is, of course, why do such rapid changes occur because they do occur sometimes? We haven't really got a good idea what triggers them and what makes them move. At the same time, as I said, we can't go on innovating like we are. So the question is, can we simulate and stimulate them in certain directions rather than do what we've done for two and a half centuries, basically innovate in whatever direction sort of came in front of us? All scales, all disciplines.

Then on the action front, transition is the core urgency. Transition itself, such transition processes are not only social science challenges, but are also things that we need to think about proffering solutions for. One of the ways that we have been doing that is in a project that I'm currently involved with in Europe, which is called emergence by design. I want you to think about those two words. Emergence in the sense it comes bottom up. Design, there is also planning. It is that juxtaposition that I think we need to move ahead with what sustainability is all about.

Very briefly, give you a few of the points that in the work that I've done have been, for me, breaking points, break through points where I began to understand more of what's going on. I think one of the very fundamental things that I've picked up through my colleagues in IHO and similar colleagues in France is the idea that the human cognitive system not only has evolved over those two and a half million years or more and has been able to grasp more and more dimensions, more and more things simultaneously.

But that that also has had a end point, at least for the moment, about a couple a hundred thousand years ago, by the time we were able to deal with let's say 8+/- two dimensions. You can imagine those dimensions as the possibility of holding eight balls in the air at the same time. We can't do much more than that. We cannot cognize simultaneously complex phenomena that are more complex than that, which does mean that whenever we act upon the environment not only do we do it from a very simplified point of view because that's all that we know about that, but also that when we actually act, we affect all those other dimensions that we don't know. That ultimately leads to what we call unintended consequences, which is one of these major issues in sustainability thinking.

We'll get back to that in a moment. One of the interesting things is that if you look at our crises of today, whether it's economics or sustainability or demographics or what have you, I think it is basically the fact that we are being confronted with the explosion of unintended consequences that we've caused ourselves. One of the things to do is to start thinking about those unintended consequences better than we have so far.

Another aspect is that our thinking and our changing society is past dependent. Why? Very simple. Take five traffic lights. Each of them can be in three states: red, orange, and green. That means that together there are about 243 states that that system can assume. If you think about the links that could be behind it, that is the theory that would explain it, it's about ten billion possibilities, which makes us aware of the fact that all our theories, all our ideas are effectively under determined by our observations. Because they are, they are over determined by our earlier experiences. That is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to think outside the box.

Finally, it's very difficult for us to think about the future. I have written something about that. I think there is two points that I want to make here. The first was made by a journalist whose book I read in probably the early 70s or something like that about nuclear. He made the point to me that why is it that we have such difficulty to think about something completely new?

I think a lot of it has to do with our mode of communication, but also with our science. Science, because it wants to prove things, always has to link the present, and what is observed, to the past, what came before. That means it is very difficult to think about creativity. Our science, our reductionist science, very rarely has opened the black box of creativity itself. I think that is something we need to start doing.

There is a few other barriers and I'm not going through all of these systematically. I have already talked a lot about the role of science. I want to, on this slide, highlight one point. That is that science attempts always to create clarity. That is what we do. We want to explain. We want to be clear. In order to do that, we simplify. That is that reductionism.

It's very interesting to study that juxtaposition with what politicians do. Politicians don't want clarity. If they want clarity, they lose because they lose part of the population that they could otherwise mobilize. Either they go for a relatively fuzzy but emotionally satisfying solution, or they actually go for an extremist point of view that rallies a particular part. That is one of the issues that I think we need, as scientists, to be much more aware of.

Finally here on this slide, the fact that we, after 50, 60, 70, 80 years of science and technology, I think have an overconfidence in what it can actually achieve. Things never turn out the way they were planned to turn out. [Inaudible 0:26:19], the Nobel Prize Winner who has looked at these perception issues, calls this the planner's fallacy. We can plan. We must plan. It is our best way out. But we shouldn't believe completely in what we are planning.

Societal barriers. The difficulty of anticipating the impact of societal dynamics. There are millions of people involved. It's a very complex system. We never know what actually comes out of it. I think we can begin to limit that at least, ring fence that problem, by moving into big data. that is something that we're here planning to do in a major way in which I think it'll be essential for the better understanding that the social sciences will need to provide over the next century or so.

I already talked about the politicians. Finally, I want to talk a little bit about the failure of top down in this domain. What is the problem here? Effectively, top down, as it is driven in our society, cannot work on a global scale. We don't have the tools. More than that, what we find increasingly is that the successful attempts at achieving sustainability do come bottom up. They're simply groups of people who want to change their own life and do that. A wonderful example of that is the transition towns movement in Britain where one after another all these towns are mobilizing their own citizens to actually go in the direction of a more sustainable environment.

Then we ask questions. The rest of this is just some questions. What kind of a transition? Do we want an incremental transition or do we want a quantum jump? Can we have a quantum jump? Or do we want something different which is not top down, which is not bottom up, but what one of my colleagues calls sandwiched innovation, sandwiched change. A lot of what culture is about is about that kind of sandwiched change because it is in between the ideas that we have in our minds, even unconsciously, and what comes up bottom up. We have to articulate those.

Another aspect of that is the normative aspect of our science. That is unusual in many sciences, but we need to come to terms. We need to come up with the ethics of stewardship. We need to have a societal discussion about what kind of future do we even want? So far, what we've done is define our future on the basis of what we don't want about the past or what we absolutely want to keep about the past. We haven't really thought about the articulation between all those things and the difficult points that we need to negotiate to get through that.

Finally, how do we deal with cultural differences across a globe that is so profoundly culturally diverse? How to convince? A number of points here as well. Do you want to force people? Do you want to dialogue with them? Do you want to have a policy debate? What do you want to do? How do you identify innovative and exciting accelerators? Scenarios are a really important part if we want to start thinking about the future. We do far too little of it and we need to stimulate that. That is where science and imagination comes in as such an important new initiative at the University.

Do we actually need to really deconstruct our institutions? Another question, a very important one, can we? That's an interesting question if you balance the developing world against the developed world. Some people would argue the developing world is more likely to come up with the new solutions than the developed world. Unfortunately countries in the developing world are not really recognizing that.

Something about science, and again I will go through this just point wise but not complete. Science is losing credibility in a general sense. Michael has given us this figure that since 1974 the investment in higher education or was it education as a whole? Higher education has gone down from 1 percent to 0.6 percent. Why? Because we haven't been able to communicate. We haven't been able to do the things that society actually needs. We have created excessive expectations with the whole let's say golden 30s and that whole innovation explosion.

We have generated untold unintended consequences which now catch up with us. And we have been institutionalized. A lot of people distrust us because our institutions have been webbed in by a set of government institutions for example. I would argue that one of the things we need to do is to go back to the citizen scientist. That was a different model. It was driven by curiosity, rather than by disciplinary laws or practices.

Finally, the role of scientific communication and education. One of the things that I feel we should really try and do, and that is where the gaming efforts that we're trying to do here at ASU are important, we need to start educating our children from a very early age into thinking in alternatives. We don't do that. We give them stories. We are torn as teachers between on the one hand socializing the kids and on the other hand helping their creativity. It's much easier to socialize them and it also needs to be done. Ultimately, we actually suppress a lot of the alternatives that would be open and we suppress in individuals the thinking in alternatives that I think is necessary if we ever want to get to a point where we think outside the box.

I'm going to cut a little bit of this. We are way late. I want to focus one moment on the economy as a driver. I think one of the things that is fundamental for the last two and a half centuries and that has brought us to the kind of predicament where we are now is that we, with the industrial revolution, the last break fell away on the acceleration of innovation. Suddenly we had energy galore and that meant it was much easier to start innovating.

What changed is for a very long time, millennia until that moment, what transformed an invention into an innovation that was accepted in society was actually demand. A good example that I always cite from archeology is that iron working was developed a thousand years before it was actually used in Europe. Last night I was talking to Sir Crispin about the same phenomenon we see that it's important in societies to suppress innovation. We don't ever look at that. That is something I hope to do with [Inaudible] who I think just left the room because he has to teach.

One of the interesting things then is we have to accelerate faster and faster and faster. Why? Because we have to keep our GDP growing. In order to keep our GDP growing, the total value space of our cultures needs to be expanding at any time. That means that we have to invent faster and faster. That has lead, and now I come back to another point that Sir Crispen raised this morning, to a not only unbridled innovation but also almost unbridled population growth and unbridled resource use and it has lead one of my colleagues to call the current wave of innovation the biggest ponzy scheme of all times because we need to go faster and faster and faster.

Yet, we do need values to keep our society together. There is nothing else to keep a society together. Can we, is the question then, come up to more non-material values than where we are at present? This is an interesting issue to be researched, I think.

Okay. I'll end up with this one. A little bit about governance. How do we manage for emergence? Governance has difficult doing that because it has difficulty learning for the future rather than learning from the past. How do we focus innovation if we don't know how invention goes? How creativity actually is not random, but is very clearly constrained? One piece of research that I'm beginning to get into, how do we articulate the normative and the practical? There I come back to this question, what future do we even want and how do we get there? Then individuals versus institutions. The commons problem that Eleanor Ostrom brought so clearly into our sphere as sustainability scientists.

Then finally, and I'll end with that one, how to make participation fun? I think that's absolutely crucial if we want to get anywhere. We have been too long as scientists promoting the idea that this was a crisis and it was all doom. We need to step out of that because you can never motivate a society with doom stories for a long time. It works fine to get your research money, but it works much less fine to actually get others interested in what you're doing. Let's leave it at that.