: Laura Calandrella
: Our Next Evolution Transforming Collaborative Leadership to Shape Our Planet's Future
: Lioncrest Publishing
: 9781544517001
: 1
: CHF 7.30
:
: Management
: English
: 222
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The environmental crisis is advancing at an unprecedented pace and scale. It will outpace us if we don't turn our attention to an even deeper concern regarding the future of humanity: we need to work together to create change. Our current approach to collaboration is outmoded. To transform our world, we must transform the way we lead. We collectively share the power and responsibility for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future. Leaders who hope to shape that future must develop the ability to embrace relationships-to ourselves, to one another, and to the natural world-as our most impactful, influential tool. Our Next Evolution delivers a framework for 21st century collaboration through four interlinked leadership practices: Cultivating Presence, Creating Space, Leveraging Diversity, and Sustaining Dialogue. These four practices enable us to take collective action in new ways, carving a path toward a future we crave but can't yet see. We have the capacity to create vibrant communities, build thriving economies, and sustain our natural resources-but only when we learn to do so together. Only when we evolve.

Introduction


The first Earth Day celebration occurred in 1970 amid dire predictions that seem to echo the urgency of the crises we still face fifty years later. There was a sense of panic around the state of the planet and a guarantee that our world would change forever without immediate, decisive action.

At the time, Harvard biologist and Nobel Laureate George Wald said, “Civilization will end within fifteen to thirty years unless immediate action is taken against the problems facing mankind.”1

Barry Commoner, a Washington University biology professor and 1980 United States presidential candidate, wrote in the scholarly journalEnvironment, “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”2

Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, was also fundamental in making predictions (and is still at work today). He shared in the vision that the path we were on was headed toward crisis. “Sometime in the next fifteen years, the end will come. And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity,” he told CBS News in 1969.3 It was this kind of energy that fueled the increase in production of food grains, a market response known as the “Green Revolution.”

Of course, this was not the first time society feared environmental devastation. If we track the epistemology of conservation—that is, the theory of knowledge that distinguishes justified belief from opinion—and the way our collective understanding of what’s at stake has changed over time, it’s clear just how far we have come.

Our Evolving Consciousness


A little over a century ago, a camping trip became the spark that ignited a new level of environmental consciousness in the United States. Naturalist John Muir had the full attention of President Theodore Roosevelt for three days in Yosemite Valley. Muir was a vocal and poetic advocate for protecting the natural beauty of the country, but it was Yosemite that most captured his heart. He wrote that “it was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.”4 Under the giant sequoias, a conversation unfolded between the two men that would lead Roosevelt to protect not only Yosemite but later sign into existence five national parks, eighteen national monuments,fifty-five national bird sanctuaries and wildlife refuges, and 150 national forests.

The nation was at an inflection point in how it valued the natural world. In the East, colonization, industrialization, and urbanization decimated the forests, eroded the soil, and resulted in a rapid loss of fish and wildlife populations. The future of the American West didn’t look much better. The result of Manifest Destiny was a wave of migration that wa