Re: [pf]Visualize progress toward sustainability; the "bottom line"

>At 12:09 PM 4/27/01, Kaleopono sent-on an ENS E-Wire, from the Canadian:
International Institute for Sustainable Development, containing:
>
>>  "The Dashboard of Sustainability" is a unique new way to present
indicators of sustainable development - as gauges similar to the control
panel of an aircraft or car.
>>
>
At 12:58 27/4/2001 -0700, Peter Saint James wrote:
>
>   You know, I think they could have come up with a better metaphor.
>   If the PR folks who dreamed this phrase up are so obtuse as to not see
the paradox of this name, it makes me suspect that perhaps their agenda is
not really sustainability.   This smells of greenwash.
>
>
· That's facile. And doesn't recognise the use of the dashboard in gliders.

· Although that comment does apply to the vast majority of Americans, and
to perhaps-as-much-as half the rest of the world, a look at the actual
website (given in the E-Wire note that K sent) shows that they were looking
for an easily understood 2-dimensional way of presenting a multitude of facts.
http://www.iisd.org/cgsdi/dashboard_dsply.htm has:
http://www.iisd.org/cgsdi/dash_full_image_march2001.gif , and leads to:
http://www.iisd.org/cgsdi/dashboard.htm

· Previous environmental indicators have just been single numbers. There is
too much built-in bias, unseen weighting-factors and the like, when
disparate facts are firstly reduced to numbers, then combined to produce a
single "bottom line".

· I haven't looked into the IISD's "The Dashboard of Sustainability" more
than to take a quick glance over their webpages, but I'm impressed that
they combined with Mathis Wackernagel's US initiative Redefining Progress:
http://www.iisd.org/measure/compindex.asp
  has:
"On May 10, 2000 Redefining Progress and IISD merged their on-line
databases on indicator initiatives."

· The "Ecological Footprint" (from Redefining Progress) has some faults and
fairly obvious limitations, and "The Dashboard of Sustainability" will have
others (hopefully fewer and lesser), but it appears to me to be a
worth-while effort, given the need to communicate with the voting public.


· Another point. The "bottom line".
  Back in the early 1960s and '70s when I first invested my spare money,
one was investing in a company. Buying a share of that company. So you
spent quite some time studying several aspects of various companies, like
the last 3-4 years' annual reports, differences between their
justifications at the time of making a change and how it actually worked
out, the morale of the workers, whether the business was meeting an obvious
demand, and the usual economic indicators like return on capital invested
and P/E ratio.

· _Not_ just the "bottom line": the single number showing how much the
profit had changed since the last reporting period.
  One more example where an over-simplified view of what business is about
leads to bad, wrong, investment decisions. _Just_by_being_too_simple_.

David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
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