Michelle, I agree with much of what you’ve written here and some additional comments follow:

Not having read the article you did on sustainable communities, my sense is, the reason economics and profit gets equal billing is that it’s based on the generally accepted Bruntland Commission’s definition of sustainable development -- development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The three pillars to Bruntland -- environmental, economic and social – have to work in balance to make SD work for the present and the future. Seems to me the three bottom-line factors of people, planet and profits are somewhat similar.

Should businesses include the environmental and social in their economic calculations? Many would claim they do. Should “life” first and foremost? Ultimately and sadly companies answer to their shareholders and investors who are clearly more interested in the goal of profits.

The add-on which Bruntland articulates and which I don’t see enunciated in your article is time. Sustainability (and thrivability) can only be measured in time – doing something “now” that preserves the “future.” Notice that in Bruntland there’s nothing about “enhancing” the future – just simply meeting needs – sustaining, not thriving, as you rightfully state.

On top of this, we’re the ones that measure sustainability. Does the cod fish, the grizzly bear, the mountain, or the cloud spend a lot of time worrying about this? Maybe they do, however I’ve never had a conversation with a tree about how they measure it. They may also not have a concept of time. What leads us to believe that we need to have one?

I firmly believe that any new conversation around sustainability starts with the individual. Where I might differ is your notion that an individual is a “part” (isolated or connected) of something larger. For me, the individual is the whole, the part and the relationship, altogether. We are much, much larger than we believe we are or can be. Our continued inability to “be” the whole puts us as a distinct disadvantage.

And we continue to part-icle our lives and conversations everyday of our existence. Our need to label and re-label things gets us into so much trouble. Sustainability, thrivability, and extinction are nominalizations -- verbs made into nouns. What you mean by sustainability or thrivability can be worlds apart from what I believe them to mean. And yet, it is all just energy. Our need to compartmentalize, label and partition our environment and everyday world takes us so far away from the very essence of life.

We also have to recognize our inherent self-interest in these concepts. As you’ve noted, fear is at the root. Even more so, there’s a huge fear is recognizing that we are the whole and nothing else. What would our planet look like from a perceptual position of wholeness? Neil Reynolds in yesterday’s Globe and Mail goes a little way in answering this: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/please-remain-calm-the-eart...

My story is that a better way of seeing this starts with the millennia-old tenet of the golden rule – do unto the other as you would have it do unto you. While it still presupposes an “other” or a part, it also contains notions of the whole and the relationships between everything. It’s a good starting point to dig deeper in ourselves, connect with the energy and begin to make the truly authentic and purposeful choices that serve us and our universe in a much more useful way.

Bravo Michelle. The tool should not be the master. Time for us to make a little more space between our inner nature and Nature, so we can reflect, and make some decisions. (Now that's a twist, will it be the Marketers that save the world?)

Here's another example of a marketer working to change the world.  It's a great story about an engaging, interactive website called If We Ran the World.

Great conversation.. thanks Michelle. In the work done on Living Asset Stewardship, profit is a means to achieve higher purpose or stewardship of life. Bruntland's work no long fits the times simply because prioritizing in a relationship network of interactions, feedback loops and cycles, is irrelevant. The higher purpose provides the shared vision and the profit is simply part of the means. I read a 1997 estimate of the planets contribution to the economy and at a conservative estimate, it came out at $33trillion to the global economy per year. I also think we are behind if we are trying to be sustainable. We must arc to a level of harmony that brings us back into balance with planetary cycles and capacity to regenerate. Sustainable has become almost synonymous with survival which is still a consumer orientation. It isn't enough to be sustainable. We must be an integral part of the ecosystem which means ramping up company structures and the human thought that created them to much higher levels of knowledge and collective intelligence. The markets do tell the tale as Jay's research shows. The 4% of publicly traded companies globally attract shareholders who share the vision. The limitations that are in the prescription of the traditional model do not exist by the laws of attraction. I am excited by what we can achieve by doing the most simple of things: being a part of Life instead of trying to dominate, control or manipulate it. To do so, we must be learn to embrace fear rather than run from it; to use it to expand innovation and creativity. Pretty exciting I think.