By Odin Zackman

UAS Ally: Odin ZackmanEfforts in sustainability and social change are accelerating, but to truly build a movement capable of taking us forward, we need to adopt new practices in our work.

Autumn is a great time for reflection. The harvest season asks this of us after a long season of growth, and as winter slowly settles in across the northern hemisphere, we consider where the movement for sustainability and social change is heading and how we plant the seeds that will take us where we are heading. Much of this has to do more with new approaches to community-building and governance, and less about new technologies or policy approaches, although these go hand-in-hand.

We are no doubt seeing something real, powerful and transformative take root: an increased consciousness about global warming and other environmental issues, the embrace of sustainability on a corporate level (at least in theory), and the evolving and deepening attention to social issues here in the US and globally. Despite the challenges we face, perhaps because of them, it is crucial to focus on the heart of the movement that has taken us this far and take a bold step forward.

My work centers on what I call “restoring the civic ecosystem”: doing work that connects human communities in the same way we need to pay attention to the relationships that need healing and repair in ecosystems around the world. Perhaps in doing our own work in this arena, we can better serve the landscapes and communities where we live and work. The movements that have been co-evolving over the past decades in response to injustice and a need for a more humane, sustainable society don’t work in a centralized way. Part of community-building, good governance and movement-building is honoring the strength and vitality that comes from the diversity of different approaches and paths toward a common goal. However, we can all begin to embrace certain principles and practices that will help us further realize a global vision of sustainability.

While we tend to fetishize new technologies such as solar panels and hybrid cars, or turn to policy approaches to reduce emissions or encourage the development of a more equitable, green economy these are critical building blocks on the path to sustainability, but not the underlying blueprint. If there is a map that gets us to where we’d like to go, it is born more from how we relate to one another than what we produce. In order for the sustainability trend to truly be sustainable, we need to increasingly direct our attention to what constitutes the connective tissue of our relationships to one another. Looking at communication, conflict resolution and collaboration as shared practices can help each of us individually, in our organizations, and across organizations and movements grow toward our goals.

One of the primary ways in which we can move closer to our goals is to grow our ability to communicate with each other. This is so simple to say and as we know, so challenging to do. Even the suggestion of needing to improve our communication skills can bring some reactivity, or feel like a distraction from the work at hand— another thing to fit into our busy, dedicated lives of making the world a better place. And yet, it is the work at hand: we have interactions on a daily basis that might challenge us in some way from a misunderstanding with a colleague and meetings that go awry and are unproductive to shaping a key message we want to share with other organizations or the public. Far from being an afterthought, our ability to communicate well—no matter how skilled we are in this arena—must be paramount if we are to move our work in sustainability and social change forward.

Once we build deeper skills in communication and facilitation, the opportunity to explore conflict resolution is another practice calling for our attention. Years ago, when I worked for a large environmental organization, a friend commented that it must be an amazing feeling going to work everyday to “fight the good fight.” At the time, this added tremendous meaning and motivation to my efforts at protecting the environment and supporting communities addressing environmental and social injustice. Yet, if our work is about creating wholeness and health, then the perspective of fighting or struggle doesn’t truly serve us.

A hallmark of sustainability and social change work ought to be about resolving conflict, of working to heal the divisions in our culture and the inconsistencies in our perspectives about what it means to live in a healthy community. Maintaining a philosophy of struggle simply continues our struggle and undermines a new way of being that might arise: we need not feel we are giving up or compromising if we further develop conflict resolution skills to utilize them within our organizations and with those we see as obstacles on the path toward making this world more whole.

If we grow to see communication and conflict resolution as skills that can lay a foundation for accelerating sustainability, we are invited to work in a very different way—to truly work together. Collaboration asks that we model what we want to see in a world that is more sustainable and equitable: that we look toward working across lines of difference and making linkages between organizations and efforts even more than we might focus within our own organizations. This might seem impossible, if not heretical, given the importance of our work and the attention our own organizations require. While part of the gift of a diverse set of global movements working to foster social change is the variety of approaches used and issues addressed, there is a clear challenge here as well: how do we always hold our work as shared and universal as opposed to fragmented and particular?

The mission statement, as typically defined, then becomes a rallying call and an opportunity for reflection: how do we honor our mission—individually, organizationally, even ‘movement-wide’—and join with and support the incredible array of other missions that are equally inspiring and critical? Some initial answers can be found in movement-building work of organizations like the Movement Strategy Center, the coalition-building efforts of the Apollo Alliance and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the deepening bond between spirituality and social activism exemplified by stone circles and even the positive trends happening on a local and regional level among government agencies engaging in collaboration, creating inter-agency entities, forming regional governments and participating in cross-state initiatives.

All of these examples are encouraging first steps, but as anyone involved can tell you, they take time—a resource we never feel we have enough of. But the most important thing we can do if we want to cultivate community, build appropriate and robust governance structures, and restore the civic ecosystem to support broader movement-building is to devote the time necessary to improving our communication, conflict resolution and collaboration practices. This focus, along with dedicated time for reflection and taking care of ourselves, is where true change can begin to emerge and accelerate. Ironically, the sustainability movement can’t be truly sustainable if we don’t pay attention to sustaining ourselves and our organizations, and transforming the way we work.

The author and activist Deena Metzger has captured this challenge simply and beautifully in a few lines that always inspire my work in this arena and remind me of the importance of sustainability and social change efforts and the even greater importance of paying attention to the heart of this work:

There are those trying to set fire to the world.
We are in danger.
There is only time to work slowly.
There is no time not to love.

# ## Odin Zackman is a Bay-Area based teacher, consultant and writer and founder of DIG IN, an organization focused on mapping and accelerating the transition to a more sustainable society.