Sustainability often sounds mysterious, complex, political, and/or utopian; and many professionals don’t understand what it means for their field, their mission, their objectives and their day-to-day operations. This benign neglect stems from a lack of understanding of and literacy in sustainability, which in fact has much offer to all professionals. Think of sustainability as your professional best practices (in terms of operations) and your professional goals (in terms of the kind of social change, and social improvement that you’re trying to achieve). That’s what this class is about.

We will devote about 5-6 weeks studying environmental and social sustainability, and putting it in the context of other forms of sustainability (cultural, organizational, and political, mostly). We will spend about 3 weeks on decision-making for positive change, and especially the rapport between culture and sustainability, the psychology of sustainability, the values, norms, and incentives that explain why individual, organizations, and countries chose positive change (rather than status quo or injustice). In the last 5 weeks or so of the class, we will study what sustainability and best practices mean for your profession, for your specialization. You will by necessity inspire, and at least partly lead or co-lead with me, this last module of the class.