SUSTAINABILITY PERSPECTIVES:

#8: First Homework

This is the eighth in our series of articles describing the Sustainability Visioning project that SaskFlax is working on.

Lee Pengilly is a rancher, writer and published author from Melville, Saskatchewan. She was one of seventeen stakeholders in the Canadian Flax Sustainability Visioning Project.

Along with the “Rules of Engagement” for the conference call, we received our “homework” – a series of questions that TNS facilitators would use to guide our discussions. After taking a quick peek at the document I discovered it was going to take some thinking!

Not only was it a review of the eLearning material, but it also required us to interpret the information into our own day-to-day experiences. For example:

• Name the top two learnings and top two challenges you have had from this module.
• What is YOUR definition of sustainable development?
• Summarize an example that you know that illustrates the decreasing supply of natural resources or the decreasing capacity of the earth to provide ecosystem services.
• Individually consider and identify:
  • How symptoms of “the funnel” might affect the flax industry. (Remember, “the funnel” is a metaphor summarizing the declining resources and ecosystem services the earth is able to provide and humankinds’ increasing demand for resources and ecosystem services.)
  • Strategic benefit and opportunities for the flax industry to become more proactive on sustainability.
  • Any other thoughts on why the flax industry would benefit from proactively addressing sustainability.

At the prescribed time and date and with my mind swirling, it was with a mix of trepidation and anticipation I dialed the number, provided my password and joined in the first conference call. I will sum up by saying that it was a most interesting hour and half I had invested and hung up the phone with a changed tune about conference calls.

On to Module 2 of the eLearning process: Systems Thinking, Backcasting from Principles, the Principles of Sustainability and the ABCD process.

Continue to next article in the series...