What is sustainability?

Sixteen conversations that broke my definition and rebuilt it from scratch

Dear Guardians,

I founded the Green Software Foundation. I’ve spent years telling people what sustainability means. Then I spent a year on a podcast actually asking the question and the answer broke everything I thought I knew.

Tom and I started House of Life just over a year ago. I’d shared my Guardians of the Edge of Chaos article draft with him and he immediately said, “we should talk.” We had a long conversation over Zoom and I proposed, let’s start a podcast. Not to build an audience, but to explore ideas together. We’d make a commitment to each other and the world, the podcast would hold us accountable to keep speaking.

It’s been a wonderful experience. We’ve explored loads and I’ve grown and learned so much in the process.

We consider 2025 as the first season of HoL. That’s not what we planned (we planned just to speak) but we came to a natural conclusion to the threads we were exploring. Before we embark on season 2, I wanted to write up what my learnings were.

Given our backgrounds and where we were coming from, the first season was really exploring one question: “what is sustainability?”

I don’t want to speak for Tom but for me, the definition of sustainability has cracked over the years. I’d created the Green Software Foundation, convinced Microsoft to create the Green Cloud Advocacy role (which I stepped into), and all of it stemmed from a powerful and spiritual moment I had with Ayahuasca (which I detailed in the Guardians article).

I’d assumed my mission was to work on sustainability, since that’s what the earth would want... right?

After you work in sustainability for a while you realise it’s a human construct. It’s a series of decisions humans have made about what it means to be sustainable, full of contradictions, full of compromises. But underneath it all there is a thread, something true. What is that thread? What does it really mean to be “sustainable”? That’s what Tom and I were exploring in the first season.

We explored many topics, we weaved in and out of things like ancient civilisations, the nature of consciousness, AI, aliens, religion, war and many others. It’s a tangled web but for me eventually the answer was simple and obvious.

Let me start with one of my first definitions of sustainability.

Power

I walked in with a thesis about power. I’ve spoken about it many times on stage, it’s called my spectrum of power.

There is a spectrum of power, on one side lie the powerful and on the other side lie the powerless.

But first, let me define “power”. The definition I like is: power is the ability to influence people and events. If you have the ability to influence people and events, you have power over them. If someone has the ability to influence you, they have the power. It’s a spectrum, it’s fuzzy, it’s reductionist. But I like it.

Now the typical argument is some sort of diatribe about being pro-powerless and anti-powerful, but I find that too simplistic. There is always someone more powerless than you. If you earn $32,400 a year, you are already in the top 1% of the world. All your hatred towards the powerful and yet to the majority of the world “YOU” are the powerful elite. Similarly no matter how powerful you are there is always someone or something more powerful than you. How about death? That’s pretty powerful. Good luck with that one.

So what I focus on is the forces, not the states. There are two forces at work: a force that dilutes power into as many hands as possible and a force that works to concentrate power into as few hands as possible.

What is the problem we are facing other than there is too much power in too few hands? Why do corporations feel they can pollute? Because they have more power. Why can’t we do anything about it? Because power is too concentrated.

The power spectrum dynamic still works for me. But we went deeper, and the next thesis completely blew my mind.

Peace

Tom had written an article about why is peace was not a core pillar of the sustainability movement. When he covered the concept on the podcast I actually put my face in my hands and said “Shit, that’s such a good point.”

“why is peace was not a core pillar of the sustainability movement” - Tom Greenwood

I’ve been a peace activist my whole life. I’ve gone on marches. I don’t believe there is ever a good reason for a war. And I mean never. War is never better for the population at large than peace. War is trauma that lasts generations, war is revenge that is never satiated.

In 1916, with World War I looming, a group of Nebraska citizens petitioned Congress with a proposed constitutional amendment: wars would go to a national referendum. If the population voted yes, the country would go to war. But with a caveat: if you had voted yes, you were automatically enlisted to fight. The petition got so many signatures they had to tape extra paper to the document. It never passed.

War excites people. They think of it as a video game or a Marvel movie, the cause is romantic and worth the “death”. I struggle, really really struggle, to imagine a war where I would be happy to lose my sons in. My sons go off fighting, and don’t come back. Would I be happy to say at least they died for a “cause”, or would I be asking, why? What exactly was the reason?

Even if you JUST cared about the carbon emissions in the abstract (life be damned), the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage was the largest single methane release ever recorded. Up to 485,000 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere, the equivalent of 8 million cars driven for a year. And military emissions aren’t even included in IPCC reports. Reporting is voluntary under the Paris Agreement. Militaries may be responsible for 5.5% of global emissions. Let’s ignore war, war isn’t important, look over here, look anywhere else.

Peace has to be at the centre. Without it, nothing else we talk about matters.

The silence of the sustainability community on the Palestinian genocide proved this for me. I tried posting about it. I got back messages (private and public) about how they can’t even write a post acknowledging the suffering of Palestinians. However, they will post critique on every corporation that fails to meet their bar. One feels safe, a signal of your virtue, a signal that you are “one of us”, the other means taking a risk.

What are you even in the sustainability space for if not to reduce suffering? That’s the whole reason carbon matters, because of its impact on people and the planet. So if you care about suffering from climate change in ten years but not people dying today, then reducing suffering was never actually your reason. The argument you’ve built your identity on doesn’t survive contact with your own silence.

The fact that the majority of the sustainability community can’t unanimously call out wars and genocides tells you it’s operating more like an ideology.

Which brought us to the next thread.

Suffering

Tom raised the point if sustainability is about reducing suffering, shouldn’t veganism be part of it?

“if sustainability is about reducing suffering, shouldn’t veganism be part of it?” - Tom Greenwood

Leslie Cross, vice-president of The Vegan Society, proposed in 1951 that veganism should be understood not as a diet or a lifestyle or a set of actions, but as a principle: “The doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals.” At its core, a movement about reducing the suffering of other beings.

I thought about what Tom proposed for a week and by the next episode I came back with a story. I had been struggling with a huge aphid problem in my garden. We grow veggies every year and aphids really started destroying our plants, especially the beans. I’d tried everything. One day I tried just crushing the aphids on the stem of the plant, rubbing my fingers over the plant and creating a field of death and destruction all over the stem and leaves. It seemed to work!

I was killing the aphids to save the beans. The aphids must think I’m the monster, but... I’m saving the beans.

That’s where the suffering argument started to break down for me. What you’re doing with suffering is deciding who’s in your in-circle (you country? all humans? all humans and pets? all humans and pets and animals? how wide do you go?) and then optimising for reducing your circles suffering by increasing the suffering of others. Everything we do creates suffering. Everything we do has some level of exploitation.

I concluded that the suffering frame generates rhetoric, not real conversations. Everyone can justify their preferred suffering. So we were stuck. Until we found a frame that did work.

Compassion

We moved in later episodes to talk about unity and compassion. Compassion comes from the Latin: com meaning “together”, and pati meaning “to suffer”.

So the goal perhaps is not to reduce suffering, but to share in it.

If we had more compassion for others (and ourselves) it doesn’t mean we won’t cause suffering. We might have to, we need to eat for instance. But at least it means we’re conscious of it. We accept it. We accept the consequences of it.

But why does compassion work where the suffering frame didn’t? We kept on coming back to something.

Hinduism talks about the atman (individual soul) temporarily forgetting it’s actually Brahman (universal consciousness). Sufism is full of the soul’s painful longing to return to union with the divine. You find this same thread in Christianity, Gnosticism, Kabbalah. Tradition after tradition.

Across spiritual and religious traditions, the same pattern emerges: Unity → Separation → Return to Unity.

If we’re all expressions of one awareness that split off and is trying to return to unity, then your suffering literally is my suffering. The separation is the illusion. Compassion isn’t a moral choice. It’s recognising what’s actually true.

The separation, that’s what stops us from feeling compassion. That’s what causes the suffering. And compassion is the path back to unity.

But compassion requires something practical. It requires connection. Which brought us to the thing that tied it all together.

Relationships

Tom told me about a Reiki course he’d attended. He commented that one of the things that struck him was the quality of presence in the room. The way people actually looked at each other. The depth of attention. And he remembers thinking “What the hell? Why do I feel deprived of this? Why is this not something I experience in an average day?”

We’ve built a world of connection, technologies that leave us more disconnected than ever. Digital interactions give us the appearance of connection without the substance. We’re drowning in low-quality contact while starving for genuine presence. And it’s getting worse. AI is filling our feeds with synthetic voices. COVID forced us home, out of each other’s bioelectric fields, out of the physical presence that humans evolved to need.

If compassion is shared suffering, it requires connection. And right now, we’re systematically dismantling our capacity for that connection.

I’ve spent years running a consensus-based standards organisation, bringing together people with wildly different opinions. What I learned is that agreement comes through disagreement. Working through conflict actually strengthens bonds. Relationship isn’t about avoiding friction. It’s about having the friction and staying together anyway.

Tom told me that he and his partner Vineeta have an agreement: no matter what they argue about, their relationship is more important than the thing they’re arguing about. The relationship comes first, always. And I think that’s what sustainability looks like at the human level. If all humanity prioritised staying in relationship (even when we disagree) we’d somehow find a way of solving the other things.

But there’s another relationship that matters just as much: the relationship with yourself.

A lot of my own journey has been learning to connect with myself. Basic things like learning to answer the question “how do you feel?” with an actual answer. Statistically, most humans can only name three emotions: happy, sad, and angry. That’s one hint of the level of disconnection we feel towards ourselves. We don’t even have the language. My coach recommended Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, which names 87 scientifically peer-reviewed emotions. I’m trying desperately to remember and use them in a day-to-day context. The subtle difference between jealousy and envy. The difference between pity and compassion.

A lot of my spiritual lessons and awakenings have been less about connecting with the world and more about connecting with myself. Understanding who I am. Being present with my own experience.

So what is sustainability? Maybe it’s this: maintaining connection. With each other. With ourselves. With the living world. The thread that runs through all of it is relationship (and our willingness to stay in it even when it’s hard).

Back to the Edge

A year ago, I wrote a piece called Guardians of the Edge of Chaos about my sustainability origin story. Life exists in a narrow band between order and disorder (the edge of chaos). My calling was to guard that precarious balance.

I thought I was talking about the planet. I was. But I was missing something.

What these sixteen conversations helped me see is that the edge of chaos isn’t just out there. It’s in here. We ourselves are eddies in that cosmic swirl. Our minds, our relationships, our communities (each one holding the balance between rigidity and dissolution). The polarisation we feel in society? That’s us collectively tipping off the edge. And the discomfort we feel when we resist that pull, when we try to see both sides, when we refuse to let an argument become a war (that’s the feeling of staying balanced).

It’s supposed to be uncomfortable. That’s how you know you’re still on the edge.

So what is sustainability? After a year of asking, I realise I’d already answered it. I just hadn’t understood how far the answer went. Sustainability is guarding the edge of chaos (not just the planet’s edge, but our own). It’s fractal. It operates at every scale, from the individual to the planetary. And guarding it means doing the work at every level.

That’s what I’m guarding now. Not just out there. In here too.