This ambitious project proposes to examine in depth the relationship and interactions between two of the dominant issues of the day – how to achieve sustainability, and how to be innovative. There seems to be a fundamental opposition between them, which has set them on a collision course. On the one hand, the current preoccupation with sustainability is one of the adverse consequences of the innovation explosion of the last two centuries that has driven the world economy, while on the other innovation may be the only way out of the sustainability predicament and the economic crisis. Superficially at least, the two concepts (and the predicaments they represent) appear to be entangled in a way that makes it very difficult to find a way forward. Moreover, both concepts are ill defined in the current scientific, technical and popular literature. We do not have generally accepted, coherent theories of either. We do not fully understand invention and innovation, and cannot decide on what would constitute a sustainable future. Instead, we have mostly contented ourselves with looking at the results and impact of invention and innovation and, on ways to attain sustainability, without defining what it is, focusing on what happens before sustainability.

In order to focus our innovative capacities better, we need to know more about the process of invention and innovation, and construct theories of that process, and if we desire to achieve sustainability we need to ask ourselves what future(s) we want, rather than what kinds of future(s) we want to avoid. In the case of innovation, we need to position ourselves at a time before the invention of the innovation, and study the emergence of the ‘new’ from a generative perspective (i.e. work forward from the past to the present), whereas in the case of sustainability we must position ourselves in the future and work back in time to the present. Both are contrary to current scientific custom, in which we look for the origins of the present (working back) and look forward to the future we want to observe. In both cases, we have to extend the temporal scale of our observations beyond what is customary. If we do that, what can we expect, what would be the difficulties, and what could be the advantages?

This new project at ECLT brings together an international group of cutting-edge scholars in the environmental, social and information sciences that will substantively enrich the discussions at ECLT over the coming years. It is directed by David Lane (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), Sander van der Leeuw (Arizona State University), Kristian Lindgren (Chalmers University of Technology & European Centre for Living Technology) and Stefan Thurner (Medical University of Vienna).

Attached material:

Climate and Society: Lessons from the Past 10 000 Years (4.65 MB)

A safe operating space for humanity (Link)