Listmania: A List of the Top Sustainability Lists at the Turn of the Year/Decade

By CSRwire Contributing Writer Bill Baue of Sea Change Media

New years (and decades) spark reflection on things gone by and projection of things to come, and for some strange reason we like to enumerate our past and future successes and failures, blessings and curses, opportunities and obstacles in lists. Sustainability lists are making the rounds, so I figured I'd round them up in a kind of list of lists, or a meta-list analyzing trends.

1. "Green Investing: A Top Ten List For 2010" by Portfolio 21 on CSRwire.com

This is no fluff piece, but rather a profound assertion of the shifting economic landscape as climate change and resource depletion expose our misplaced faith in a perpetual growth economy. Bolstering this analysis is a spate of recent research revealing a flat decade for the S&P 500 and other stock indexes, for job growth, for homeowner value - or what Paul Krugman calls, "The Big Zero." Portfolio 21 CEO Leslie Christian zeros in on this trend as an opportunity to re-frame how we measure prosperity within the limits of ecological capacity, which she states "is arguably the most important business challenge facing companies in the 21st century."

One conclusion: "Financial analysis must be integrated with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues." Another conclusion exposes the Fed's bankrupt practice of printing money to throw at our economic problems by asking, what would Mother Earth do?: "Unfortunately, while it is possible to borrow money, at least for a while, there is not another set of ecosystems from which we can borrow ecological capacity." In sum, Portfolio 21 turns this half-empty glass upside down by pointing out that the transition to a sustainable economy represents a significant investment opportunity "to prosper in the 21st Century."

Bill Roth's excellent "Four 2010 Issues Investors Cannot Ignore" list on TriplePundit.com supports these conclusions, underlining that "debt is now the 800 pound gorilla that can no longer be fed" and the relevance of "peak everything," or the emerging concept that "demand growth for our world's resources is exceeding incremental growth in supply."

2. "The Green Business Decade in Review" by Joel Makower on GreenBiz.com

Makower examines the same sustainability glass and finds it a quarter full. He laments that 1) "we're not moving the needle," 2) "the public still isn't getting it," and 3) "there's little sense of urgency," illustrated by the conspicuous lack of "masses marching in the streets demanding action on climate change in the name of future generations." In short, Makower soberly assesses that we've largely squandered a decade's worth of opportunity to overhaul business-as-usual toward a truly sustainable trajectory, instead tolerating "superficial" changes that "barely scratch the surface" of needed transformation.

Flipping the glass over produces the optical illusion of a glass three-quarters full, so Makower entertains three reasons for optimism: 1) "green innovation is booming," 2) "companies are reinventing themselves," and 3) "sustainability is becoming about more than just the environment" by expanding to encompass social priorities as well. In the end, though, he asks himself whether his optimism "amounts to a false sense of hope - that all of this good news may be too little, too late. But maybe not."

3. "The 10 Best Books of the Decade on Business Sustainability" and "The 10 Best Books of the Decade on Capitalism in Crisis" by Andrew Newton on ApeSphere.com

This pair of blog posts advances ApeSphere Founder Andrew Newton's version of the bright/dark dichotomy. "Best" lists practically beg for quibbling, and I'll fulfill my obligation by protesting the exclusion of David Korten's Agenda for a New Economy (or its precursor The Great Turning) from the crisis list, and Dan Esty and Andrew Winston's Green to Gold and Andy Savitz's The Triple Bottom Line from the business sustainability list. And why list Dan Goleman's Social Intelligence without at least nodding to his more recent Ecological Intelligence, which address sustainable business more directly.

Nit-picking aside, the value in these lists for me is in unearthing buried gems – such as Edward Freeman's volume on stakeholder theory, the notion he introduced in 1984, and of course Majorie Kelley's Divine Right of Capital - as well as in introducing unknown titles, such as Lynn Sharp Paine's Value Shift and Lisa Dodson's The Moral Underground.

4. "The 20 Most Popular Stories of 2009" by the GreenBiz Staff

This list essentially represents the crowdsourced "best of" list, as readers voted with their clicks. The GreenBiz Editors make it fun by trying to impose some interpretation of trends amongst the otherwise random sampling, such as a predominance of articles on packaging and Walmart (including a list: "Survival Tips for Walmart Suppliers: Beware the Top 10 Sustainability Myths").

What I see in this list is a preference for complexity over simplicity, exemplified by Jeff Swartz's "Bottled Water is Way More Complicated Than I Thought," which starts from the kinds of assumptions elsewhere represented in TheGoodHuman's "12 Reasons to Stop Drinking Bottled Water" (such as "It can take nearly 7 times the amount of water in the bottle to actually make the bottle itself"), but soon the Timberland CEO finds himself confronting cascading consequences, such as the need for more reusable glasses and dishwashers and the ensuing question, is their lifecycle environmental footprint less than the cumulative footprint of water bottles?

As with the GreenBiz Most Popular Stories list, this CSRwire list of lists lacks a content-based organizing principle, preferring instead to create value by introducing the unexpected juxtapositions embedded in this somewhat random survey of sustainability lists bringing closure to the past year and decade, and framing our launch into a new era.