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With the start of 2025, and with an exciting year ahead for the Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform, it seems an opportune moment to reflect on the achievements since the last newsletter in 2024. Our project teams have been had a busy and productive time and our research is now producing a steady stream of high-quality research articles, many of which we’ve summarised on our news site, and are linked below.
In September I had the privilege of spending three and a half weeks in the USA. It started with attendance at the inaugural National Sustainability Society Conference, held in Seattle, Washington. Something dawned on me there.
Since I’ve been leading the Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform I have wondered how a concept as broad and all-encompassing as sustainability can hold a group of people together. In Australia, there is a fair bit of effort on different parts of the sustainability agenda across government, research, business and civil society organisations. Most of these activities focus on different specific parts of the broader sustainability agenda. For example, they drill into mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, reversing biodiversity loss, closing the gap between First Nations and other Australians, and many more specific concerns. Each of these on its own is a very big challenge. What does the wider agenda of sustainability offer? For me the answer to this is obvious. While there are challenges in getting to grips with addressing multiple, intersecting issues, the payoffs can be big. The potential for creative thinking and analysis can identify ways to enact change that delivers on multiple connected goals at once.
The example that always stands out to me from Australia is the story of re-instating Indigenous fire management across much of northern Australia. It delivers carbon emission abatement, creating carbon credits for Traditional Owners, thereby enabling Indigenous Ranger Programs that create jobs and strengthened cultural connections with country, they create educational and meaningful work prospects, and support the ongoing development of traditional knowledge with western science. It’s a much more complex story of course, but however you look at it, it’s a story that couldn’t have happened if only one group had framed the problem, or developed the solution.
In very different contexts and cases, this is the sort of story I heard at the National Sustainability Society Conference in Seattle, and elsewhere on my travels. The people I met at the conference and elsewhere were hugely varied, spanning Ivy League university scholars and inspirational community college professors, people working in government and civil society organisations, businesses ranging from Microsoft to small sustainability-oriented start-ups. At the conference, the parallel sessions ranged hugely: soil health to philosophy, to the role of AI in sustainability, to the forms of engagement that work with different groups. Despite, perhaps because of this diversity, the audience seemed to engage with a sort of omnivorous interest that I have rarely seen in Australia.
Perhaps it is just that a country as large as the USA can bring together a critical mass of people around almost anything! But I think there is something more to it.
As I travelled after the conference, visiting colleagues at Arizona State University and UC Davis, going on field trips and to workshops, meeting new people, exploring commonalities and differences in our research, and ways of doing it, I started to hear a recurring thing – there is no longer a centre that can hold. While the Americans I met were often leaders in their field, their reach was small. They focussed on their city, their county. The nation was unfathomably large, messy and out of scope. When they talked about size they were not talking about population. Certainly not landmass. They were talking about the incommensurability of social cohesion, with research, policy and politics at scale. The palpable polarisation bred from extreme individualism that is their competitive disadvantage, paradoxically enough bred from a (at least rhetorical) commitment to free markets and many other freedoms.
Of course, we suffer from sectoral siloes, institutional inertia, and tall poppy syndrome and a stack of other ailments. In research, our disciplines and funding structures are pack-a-day habits that are near impossible to kick. But the realisation that our relatively tight networks, even across a highly diverse society, are our unassailable asset –our competitive advantage – it left me with even more optimism than usual, and I have been wearing it on my sleeve much of the time since my return.
I am keen to keep the momentum building for myself and the wider team in the VS FSP. The links below go into more detail on the achievements since our last newsletter. I am particularly proud of the pipeline of publications resulting from our projects, and the upcoming reports from the nature sustainability technical panel expected later this year.
Yours in Sustainability Science,
Peat Leith, Director, VS FSP
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