Thursday, November 10, 2011

Sustainable Development - The Words on the Lips of Experts

Every year I go to the Balaton Group Meeting eager to meet old friends, to engage, listen and learn more about what is on the frontier of sustainabilty thinking. This group of 55+ systems modellers, sustainable development experts, professors, practitioners and activists gather annually for a 5-day meeting to explore and share and ponder the past, present and future of the planet. They work to understand the dynamics, identify the leverage points for change, and search relentlessly for where the hope is.

I took pages and pages of notes this year (the 30th meeting, on the shores of Lake Balaton), and when I looked back at these notes just now I asked myself where the weight of the discussion lay - the models, the math, the crises, the peaks, the systems? When I put all my notes into a wordle, the above popped out.  I think it speaks for itself...