Dream boldly.

To illustrate our society’s upstream approach to waste, in a previous column I asked you to imagine trash floating down a stream. In another, to show how human activity depends upon fossil fuels and finite resources, I asked you to picture emitting a putrid red gas each time you used non-renewable or threatened resources.

Now, please dream boldly again, and imagine a framework for a sustainable society. Envision a framework consistent with the laws of thermodynamics, peer-reviewed, tested over time, and adopted and used by successful businesses and municipalities worldwide. Let’s say the framework is even used and endorsed by the American Planning Association, is compatible with all the best tools for sustainability, has four robust principles for decision-making, and is generic enough for any activity at any scale.

Are you picturing what that might be like? If such a framework existed, we would have a shared model for cooperation to help us make pragmatic decisions to move toward sustainability. If we all learned this framework, like learning a language, we would be on the same page – able to see the gaps between sustainable and unsustainable development and activities. A framework like this would be immensely helpful as we struggle to align ourselves with the increasingly unsustainable human systems of the world.

That’s what The Natural Step is.

The Natural Step is an organization and framework started twenty years ago to address the growing gap between human consumption of resources and the ecological limits of the planet to both supply those resources and reabsorb our resulting wastes. It encompasses everything mentioned above. The Natural Step Monona is a two-year-old community group founded to help our community initiate positive changes using this framework.

The Natural Step (TNS) was created by Swedish oncologist Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt. Believing a broad understanding of the relationship between science and sustainability was essential to the continuation of life, Dr. Robèrt created a statement and asked fifty ecologists, chemists, physicists, and medical doctors to review and critique it. After twenty-one revisions, he achieved his goal of scientific consensus on the conditions for sustainability.

The TNS framework is used in businesses such as IKEA and Interface. It is used in eleven countries, including more than 25% of the municipalities in Sweden. Wisconsin leads the nation in the number of municipalities to have adopted it – at last count, twenty-two.

The framework should be institutionalized in our municipalities, integrated in our policies and procedures to last over time, so advances don’t disappear with a new administration. Ideally, the framework would become second nature for everyone, not just those in our city government.

Talk of this kind often scares some people, as they are fearful of an agenda. I was wary when it was new to me, too. But I did some research, asked some probing questions, and learned that the TNS agenda is to “guide organizations to act according to the principles for sustainability, now.” Hard to disagree with saving humanity from self-destruction, and doing it sooner rather than later.

TNS encourages citizen participation. It encourages you to be part of the discussion, debate, creativity, ethics, aesthetics, group dynamics, and common sense surrounding the steps that our community should take to move toward sustainability. It is inclusionary to the max. Citizen engagement fails when based on misunderstandings and/or poor knowledge. So, having a shared understanding of the principles of sustainability is crucial to moving forward comprehensively.

What TNS is not: a religion or spiritual movement, a framework only concerned with the environment, negative for business, a top-down framework, or just a Monona community group.

Moving toward sustainability is not easy. Learning a “new language” is difficult. But on an individual level, it will help you distinguish between truly “green” measures and “greenwashing.” For an egregious example, see the recent Wal-Mart commercial stating that if all two million of their customers bought the new vacuum they were promoting, they would save resources and wouldn’t that be a good thing for the planet? (Answer: Since when did buying two million of anything save resources? And, no; it wouldn’t.)

On the municipal level, learning the language of sustainability will empower all city workers to look at processes and policies with a new awareness for spotting gaps between what is sustainable and unsustainable. Rather than dictates from above, everyone can be looking to find ways to save our resources, our money, our future, and the next generation’s future, too.

There could be many benefits to a sustainable Monona: lowering our taxes, being a competitive base for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs, having reliable and local sources for non-polluting renewable energy, living in non-toxic homes, being healthier citizens, having green jobs, having an economic advantage over unsustainable communities, connecting with our food sources, creating zero waste… And did I say, “Do our part to keep humans from going extinct?” Yeah, that little item, too.

Individuals can make a meaningful difference in reversing our unsustainable ways. Dream boldly and imagine what your sustainable Monona might look like. And if you don’t know enough to know where to begin to dream, consider joining a study circle on the TNS framework or learning about TNS with the many great resources at the Monona Public Library’s Sustainability Section.

(Next time: “So, enough already! What is this framework?)