A Valentine's Bouquet: Twelve for 2012

Marcy Murninghan's Blolumn

The TakeAway: The blooms of sustainable prosperity and justice are fed by at least twelve currents that will get stronger throughout 2012. They involve the maturation of corporate social responsibility and corporate governance; rethinking the meaning of "fiduciary"; balancing internationalism and globalization with "local first" movements; social sustainability impact; the evolution of stakeholder engagement; the knowledge explosion and new tools / language; the importance of formal and informal education; serious action on climate, including disaster readiness and resilience; and the power of individual action.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air—love lost, love gained, love just around the corner. A good time to open our hearts, not just to people who strike our fancy, but to larger questions of purpose and meaning, and the promise of a better life. So here’s a bouquet—not of roses, but another kind of bloom, the kind that remains fragrant as long as it’s watered and nourished.

Last month I said it was time to “get off the couch” and get moving. This post continues that theme by taking you outside and identifying twelve currents in 2012 that feed the blooms of sustainable prosperity and justice—and areas that need special care. No doubt there are many more, but these are the ones I keep thinking about. Over the coming weeks, I’ll go into each more in-depth. But first, a word about context.

Before smelling the posies, let’s zoom out and look at the bigger garden of earthly delights, affecting our politics and polity. Within the U.S. and abroad, questions about the purpose of economic arrangements have risen, not just among sustainability “insiders” but in our political rhetoric, and not just in our Presidential primary campaign, but due to the efforts of Occupy Wall Street and other high-profile developments, such as a series of New York Times articles on the exploitation of workers in Apple's supply chain. This is a good thing, if we can get beyond sloganeering and bromides. 

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