An essential road map to developing model sustainability practices.
The Five Core Principles are derived from The Lab’s definition of sustainability; the five domains represent key dimensions of the underlying interaction.
Our current industrial economy is wasteful and hugely entropic in nature. It ought to be redesigned to secure a lasting advantage for all.
The First Principle: Contain entropy and ensure that the flow of resources, through and within the economy, is as nearly non-declining as is permitted by physical laws.
Examples of Policy and Operational Implications:
The accounting framework presently used to guide our economy produces a grossly distorted view of the impacts of economic activity. It does not account for externalities, it is driven by a narrow concept of growth, and it even allows us to account for consumption as though it were income.
The Second Principle: Adopt an appropriate accounting system to guide the economy, fully aligned with the planet’s ecological processes and reflecting true, comprehensive biospheric pricing.
Examples of Policy and Operational Implications:
The adaptive success of our species comes at the expense of other forms of life– from individual organisms, to species, to whole habitats. Science tells us that the very complexity of complex systems is the source of their resilience and long-term viability. Yet, at our own peril, we are reducing the richness of our planet’s complex fabric of life.
The Third Principle: Ensure that the essential diversity of all forms of life in the biosphere is maintained.
Examples of Policy and Operational Implications:
Social systems depend, ultimately, on their internal variety for robust viability and long-term health. This alone reinforces the still-fragile idea that open processes, responsive structures, plurality of expression, and the inalienable equality of all individuals should provide the cornerstone of social life.
The Fourth Principle: Maximize degrees of freedom and potential self-realization of all humans without any individual or group adversely affecting others.
Examples of Policy and Operational Implications:
The human spirit has consistently sought to transcend apparent limitations, striving to encompass progressively more into its field of vision, and to integrate an increasingly more comprehensive reality. The extent to which this drive is allowed to manifest affects the choices we make and the quality of our actions in the world.
The Fifth Principle: Recognize the seamless, dynamic continuum of mystery wisdom, love, energy and matter that links the outer reaches of the cosmos with our solar system, our planet and its biosphere including all humans, with our internal metabolic systems and their externalized extensions —
embody this recognition in a universal ethics for guiding human actions.
As a guiding principle, the spiritual dimension does not carry the connotation of conventional religion. Rather, it evokes the integration of mind and heart in realization of the essential oneness at the center of being.
Examples of Policy and Operational Implications:
The set of five domains and five primary principles is fundamentally systemic in nature, meaning that each domain affects all the others and is affected by each in return. By anchoring the essence of human motivation and intention, the spiritual principle acts as the causal root, which sets the tone for the whole. It drives the integration of the other four principles, those related to the material, economic, life, and social domains. If integrated in a balanced way, it can infuse a common purpose, provide a common foundation, and stimulate common resolve. Lacking the ethical commitment implied by the spiritual principle, considerations of questions related to the four other domains, no matter how elaborately expressed, are reduced to mere technicalities.
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