Women are key to a sustainable future

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April Knudsen serves as the Communications Project Manager for the International Living Future Institute. You can reach her at april.knudsen@living-future.org, or 503.241.1140. Learn more about Living Future 2012.

We're deep into planning the program for Living Future 2012, and it's exciting to see the speaker lineup take shape – it's secret for now, but I can assure you that it's not all women, even though our theme next year is “Women Reshaping the World.” We're looking forward to bringing the International Living Future Institute’s annual unconference back to Portland, where we are blessed with a surfeit of men and women who have long worked in the sustainability trenches.

At Living Future 2011 in Vancouver, BC, we were treated to a number of powerful speakers and topics, but just one of them brought a room of 800 to silence. Rae Anne Rushing, CEO of Seattle-based engineers and sustainability consultants Rushing spoke for just a few minutes of her struggle as a young, single mother who wanted to finish her education, then played a short video called “The Girl Effect.” If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it – now.

Backed by folks like Nike, the NoVo Foundation and the United Nations, the Girl Effect campaign is a prime example of how we can, at our best, re-shape the world. If you’re reading this post, you live a very privileged lifestyle by world standards. I'm not pointing fingers — I'm fully aware that I'm in the same "I'd like an iced vanilla soy latte" boat that I just put you in. But the fact remains that many in the sustainability field labor under the impression that we're saving the world, and I sometimes wonder if all we’re doing is saving our part of the world, for ourselves.

Working for The Natural Step going on three years now, I am still inspired (and humbled) by the fourth system condition — that in a sustainable system, people are not constrained from meeting their needs. I certainly am able to meet most of my needs with little effort, and I’m embarrassed at how little I understand about other's lives around the world. I know that business can be a lever for change, and transforming our built environment is critically important, but I feel that our best use is in helping people, regardless of the field in which we work.

The Natural Step Network-USA merged with the International Living Future Institute at the beginning of this year, a move that brought both increased capacity and complexity for all of us. I don't come from a professional background in sustainability or the built environment, and there have been times in the last few years I've stewed through meetings, frustrated because I didn't think the project or topic was all that important, didn’t see how what we were talking about would directly help anyone.

But learning about the Living Building Challenge, and seeing the deep regard for human beings that lives at the heart of the Challenge, is starting to pull the pieces of our programs together for me.

Which brings me back to next year's Living Future program. It's clear that women have always had a hand in shaping the world — around the world they still control the lion's share of household spending, start new businesses at a rate of nearly three to one compared to men, and take on much of the heavy lifting with child rearing and home- and community-building. It would be greedy for anyone to ask women to do more — but nobody had to ask.

Recently pro snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler wrote about her experience as a panelist at the 2011 LOHAS Forum in Boulder, CO

"I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing, and marketing to women specifically. I’ve gotten to work with some amazing brands that, in many cases, market to female consumers. Also, in starting my own business . . . I have learned a lot more in this area. If there was a recurring theme in the three-day LOHAS forum, it was that women all over the world are taking on new roles,” Bleiler wrote.

Rae Anne Rushing noted in her presentation last year that women are still woefully under-represented in science and math fields, and in many places around the world women and girls spend a stunning amount of time gathering water for their households. Is one of those situations qualitatively worse than the other? I think I know how most of us would respond to that question — but there’s a better question we can ask, a question I hope we can address not just at Living Future 2012, but everywhere we work and live and travel.

The question is this: what can we do to address any situation — anywhere — that keeps anyone around the world from living their best life?