Triple Bottom Line Reporting workshop debrief

It took me a while, but I have uploaded slides from the Triple Bottom Line Reporting workshop we held in July. The first of these is the main presentation by Laura Musikanski, our Executive Director:

The second is a guest presentation by Burr Stewart, who also taught the Vizualisation Tools for Sustainability class in May. He tied the themes of the two classes together, talking about performance metrics and ways to use graphics as tools to make them more tangible and persuade people to pay attention.

Tim Abbe also gave a talk about the impacts of climate change and the kinds of decision-making we're going to have to do as climate change renders previously workable plans impractical, anchored in the example of Mount Rainier National Park's management plan having to adapt to changes in the behaviour of its rivers.

This was a very conversational class, with a lot of discussion of the material, and topic coverage really being driven by what the group showed interest in. Of course, this means that reading the slides is no substitute for being there, but we're sharing the slides so that at least some of the information can be as widely accessible as possible.

We talked a lot about measurement and reporting, the importance of standards so TBL reports can be compared with each other meaningfully (which is a problem right now), and why a company would be interested in doing this kind of disclosure, which isn't yet legally mandated. We also compared and contrasted a selection of CSR reports from www.corporateregister.com.

Personally, I was struck by two things from the class which made me more optimistic than I have been. One was simply how engaged and knowledgeable the group was. I still worry that the wave of sustainability awareness we're seeing is too little, too late, but it's encouraging to see just how much more widespread a good understanding of these issues is than even a couple of years ago, when I first started working with Laura on these TBL workshops. The other was seeing Nike's CSR report, dedicated to Neil Kearney, the previous head of the International Textile Garnent & Leather Workers' Federation. Not that long ago, they would have been demonising him as an obstacle to their business and here they are publicly thanking him for pushing them to improve their labour standards. If in one generation we could go from the murder of Chico Mendes to multinationals praising the gadflies who shamed them into doing better, perhaps there is hope for us.

Earth Day 4/22/2010

On the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day it is important to take a step back and see from where we've come.

Earth Days is a documentary about the history and origin of Earth Day and the environmental movement in general. It was produced by PBS and shown on KCTS as part of their American Experience history program. It is a must watch if your own view of Earth Day is a little rusty, or worse naive.

The foundation of a holiday that many of us take for granted now was not an easy ride. The founders were rife with criticism, attacks and vilification that sounds strangely like some of the more outrageous rhetoric we hear today from climate change deniers and vested interests who still see adjusting to the reality of climate change as a detriment to their economic growth, which we know is not the case in the slightest.

The film talks about the steps they took in order to start a holiday that has seen replication across the planet and the film uses primary sources, interviews with participants and publicly released advertisements or deterrents to make a seamless film that informs and surprises.

Also check out The Story of Stuff below.

The importance of imagery

I am very much a verbal thinker—I understand a problem by reading, talking or writing about it—but I'm becoming increasingly persuaded of the value of clear, appealing images. They can be a very powerful supplement or even replacement for a mass of words, and serve many purposes:

Emotional engagement
I know I'm not the only one who has put energy into a sustainability issue, become emotionally involved, and then had trouble explaining to other people why I cared so much. For example, I was a Sound Steward for a couple of years, which involved adopting one of People for Puget Sound's habitat restoration sites, and making repeated visits to monitor and maintain the site. It's a brilliant program, both because channels volunteer labour to an important project and because close involvement with a specific site encourages the stewards to get emotionally involved. I became a sworn enemy of blackberry brambles, but had a hard time explaining to people just how much of the damage to this site was caused by human carelessness. Listing the astonishing array of trash that washed up was mindnumbing, so it was much easier to just show people:

Showing contrasts over time
A lot of the ideas we try to explain about sustainability are about contrasts over time: what we have today compared to what we've lost, or what we could have if we were collectively smarter. The scale of these changes over just a few generations can be very hard to grasp, so images can be a very powerful tool. One of my all-time favourites is Sightline's astonishing map of how far humans have shrunk the grey wolf's habitat:

Image credit: Sightline Institute, from a collection made for the Cascadia Scorecard

Demonstrating scale
Another challenge as a sustainability advocate can be conveying the collective impact of 6 billion people. So many of the behaviours we ask people to change are meaningless on their own, but become powerful when enough peoples' actions add up. The trouble is, once we start listing huge numbers, they become difficult for anyone to grasp what they mean, so help is needed. Local artist Chris Jordan has a very powerful approach to this: Running The Numbers.

Relative numbers can also be hard to put into context, and a good image can go a long way. For example, groups with a financial interest in obstructing meaningful climate change action like to talk about the thousands of scientists who have signed their petition. It sounds very impressive without its context, but a single image can clearly show what a drop in the ocean those signatures really are:

Image credit: InformationIsBeautiful.net - see their original post for details and a larger version.

Extracting wisdom from data
Finally, the process of making the right image can help us to understand what's really going on behind a mess of statistics. One of the classic examples of this was by a British doctor, John Snow, who seems to have been the first person to prove that unsanitary water spreads cholera. In the midst of an outbreak, he plotted the sites of all the cases on a map, and from that map came the insight that these incidents were all linked; an insight that was crucial to ending that outbreak and learning to control cholera ever since. For more on this story, I strongly recommend Steven Johnson's website, videos and book: The Ghost map.

Come and learn more with us
All of these are reasons why I'm excited about a new seminar we have just launched: Visualization Tools for Sustainability. The first session will be in the afternoon of May 4th, at the downtown Seattle Library, and you'll be able to learn more about making and using visualizations to tell stories about sustainability.