Each of our ‘Take Action’ themes has its own natural symbol. The use of symbology and storytelling has been harnessed by Indigenous groups for generations and has since been researched as an effective tool for committing knowledge to long term memory.

This is a symbol for simplifying sustainability for two reasons. The first is that coral and reef structures are complex, beautiful, confusing, and vulnerable to mass changes. As we see in step one of Simplifying Sustainability, the issues we face as a global human population are challenged by the diversity, complexity, and geographical differences. Sustainability, much like coral reefs, are complex! Even if we look at a single coral colony we will find a great deal of complexity in the daily function of the polyps with tide, species, and the ecosystem in which is located. Coral polyps and coral reefs illustrate the beauty, fragility, and complexity of our collective human experience.

 

The second reason for coral as a symbol for simplifying sustainability is the alignment between the coral lifecycle and our four G’s approach to simplifying sustainability. Consider yourself and your sustainability journey as a fertile time for new ideas and new ways of doing things. You may wish to build the equivalent of a grand or great reef when you start your sustainability journey (let’s face it, the ‘Great Barrier Reef’ sounds more appealing than the term ‘coral polyp’). However, most of us will find our Sustainable Self will be best served by focusing on the fertilisation of ideas, cleaving these ideas by adding new go-for-it steps, and turning our small sustainable steps into bigger ‘prawn-chip’ actions. Eventually, when we’ve played around with ideas based on our Values Motivators, we will find a sustainability mission that we want to embed into our life. Anchoring this good, great, or grandiose mission into our life. This means that rather than moving fluidly from one trending sustainability topic to the next, we really embed and commit to this mission, in hopes of growing it from just our settlement self, to bud into a colony that may include ourselves, or family, an online or community reach, or perhaps a state/national/or global reach.

Whether you float between ideas for your whole life, making small sustainable steps along the way, anchor to one spot and work on building a small coral structure or inspire an entire beautiful reef of change every last part of the coral lifecycle is important.

 

If you happen to have one idea that spawns but goes nowhere (or perhaps only reaches the motile or floating phase of development) but have done some small actions based on this or shared your ideas with a friend don’t feel like you’ve failed. There’s a good chance that the idea wasn’t really in alignment with your Values or perhaps doesn’t suit your Sustainable Self balance at this stage (or both). The ideas you’ve spawned but haven’t taken through to fruition aren’t going to waste. In a reef, not all coral spawn or motile coral make it to anchor. Instead, they become part of the food and nutrient cycling chain, being ingested by fish or surrendered back to the oceans and shorelines. The ideas you’ve experimented with will be picked up on by another. Perhaps it’s someone you know, or you might even find that your decision to search for sustainability topics make them more visible (aided by algorithms and big data) to others.

 

So while very few of us will build the equivalent of a ‘sustainable living’ coral reef in our lifetime. Each and every action or idea we float, follow and perhaps anchor into contributes a collective sustainable future of grandiose proportions.