ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an activity for helping an audience to understand that relationship between sustainability issues and individual behaviour. Sustainability must be understood personally and emotionally, as well as generally and conceptually. The Natural Step framework can be a foundation for deeper personal and intellectual understanding of important issues, and this activity uses The Natural Step System Conditions as a springboard for engaging the framework. The Natural Step is a simple conceptual framework that describes high-level conditions by which life on the planet must abide in order to survive in the long run. It was created as the result of a collaborative effort spurred by Karl-Henrik Robert, a Swedish oncologist who became troubled by the increasing frequency of child cancers. Robert, frustrated by the medical profession's exclusive focus on minutiae in the face of daunting large-scale trends, assembled a group of scientists to come up with a simple framework for understanding the basic tenets of biological survival.
