What the Next Generation Has to Teach Us about Sustainability

A couple years ago, as I was working on a sustainability project with peers on the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, I looked around the room and noticed that many of us were around the same age and had similar backgrounds. At the time, HP had an intern named Shannon Lee , who had an undergraduate degree in environmental science and was currently in a master’s program, so I asked if the group would be open to including her in our meetings. I figured that since she was a member of a generation that thinks differently than mine, as well as someone with a related technical degree, she could bring a new, valuable perspective to the table.

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Very quickly, Shannon became integral to our work on the Council that would help shape strategy for many businesses and government agencies. She also went on to win the Bill and Dave Award for demonstrating excellence among her intern cohorts. Now, more than a year later, Shannon is working full time at HP, helping lead our sustainability initiatives in the HP Labs technical community.

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In our ongoing work together, we’ve found that addressing sustainability means rethinking the habits and mindsets that have led us to the current state of the world. The urgency to act continues to mount: “There is a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to enable climate resilient development,” write the authors of the most recent?UN climate report. In order to be successful, these efforts must be collaborative.

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I’ve learned many important lessons about driving effective sustainable change through my collaborations with Shannon, but I’d do her a disservice trying to translate them for you. I asked her if she would be willing to share with all of you some of the amazing insights, she has shared with me throughout our mentorship relationship. Here they are, in her own words.

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1. Sustainability is an interdisciplinary field

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Sustainability requires all types of competencies, from finance and economics to biology, social sciences, and social equity. It’s just not something that one person can be an expert at. A diversity of ideas comes from diverse contributors and diverse employers. I brought in an intern from the same graduate school program that I was part of to continue to increase the diversity of voices we hear. When we welcome interns who are still learning new things in their classwork, we can say, “Hey, your voice is just as important as someone who’s been here for 30 years.” This approach opens up a whole new level of opportunity—and not just for the participants. We’re able to keep our finger on the pulse of what’s happening now, while still maintaining and drawing on a legacy of expertise.

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2. Companies need to change how they think about their roles in a sustainable world

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The number one idea I want to promote across industries is that you have to look at sustainability holistically. Ecosystems and communities do not work on an individual basis, so you can’t look at sustainability through a microscopic lens. For instance, you can’t look at the life cycle of a product and only focus on the use phase. You have to include the embedded energy, the negative externalities, the energy costs to mitigate those negative externalities: What are you doing with waste streams? Is there a way to harness the available energy in those waste streams? And how are you taking the materials at the end of the product’s life and putting them back into something new?

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Organizations need to take a cradle-to-cradle, holistic, fundamentals-based perspective on their sustainability efforts. They also need to be able to communicate about those efforts in a way that anyone can understand and implement, so their impact has a chance to reach the wider industry and become the basis for the next round of innovation and progress.

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3. Pursuing sustainability goals requires a long-term perspective

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I hope that the cumulative amount of work I do in sustainability—years in the future, maybe decades or generations in the future—will provide at least one more day of healthy life, of being able to engage with our natural resources, of being able to heal our relationship with the land and live the way we want to live. Even if we are not able to fix everything ourselves, if we operate now in a way that respects and prioritizes the wellbeing of future generations, we can at least give those generations a little bit more time to innovate and find sustainable solutions. This is a mindset that I hope could help anyone who’s feeling a bit overwhelmed by the magnitude and scope of the sustainability work ahead of us all. If we all contribute to this collective effort, we will find meaningful ways to improve as individuals, as organizations, as industries and as a society.