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John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austin, David Hume, Adam Smith, the Munro brothers, John Hutton and other architects of Enlightenment helping to guide our civilisation from the Dark Ages have much to celebrate:

1. Critical thinking and rational thought replaced superstition, suspicion and ignorance.
2. Science and Medicine developed cures to illness and infection where spells and magic had previously failed.
3. Mental health was recognised as an illness rather than the possession of ‘evil’.
4. Knowledge of the diversity of life and the animal kingdom replaced fear of myth and monsters.
5. Questions about Earth and its age and position in the Cosmos were asked without fear of being burnt at the stake for heresy.

Edinburgh and London’s Coffee Shops lit up with news of Captain Cook’s discovery of the Great Barrier Reef in 1768. Spoils of overseas commerce were celebrated and whispers of freedom and liberty became a reality after the American War of Independence in 1812.

James Watt perfected his steam engine and the Birmingham Cotton Factories kick started the beginning of the industrial revolution from which we would never look back…

Although Thomas Robert Malthus may have raised concerns in ‘ An Essay on the Principle of Population’ 1798, the architects of Enlightenment assumed that the commercial forces of supply and demand would ensure that human consumption was proportional to the finite resources that were available on our planet.

Since the 1600s most if not all of our Industry Sectors’s Business Cases omitted to include the true Operational Cost (OPEX) of exploiting the land to manufacture their new Products.

The cost of exploiting the land can now be described in terms of the impact against 9 critical planetary boundaries defined by Johan Rockstrom and Will Steffen’s and eloquently explained in Sir David Attenborough’s latest Witness Statement:

1. Ocean Acidification
2. Ozone Depletion
3. Nitrogen Cycle
4. Phosphorous Cycle
5. Freshwater use
6. Deforestation
7. Bio-diversity
8. Particle Pollution
9. Chemical Pollution

By overlaying above with social foundation, Kate Haworth’s Doughnut Model helps to map the impact of breaching planetary boundaries on human social life, in terms of access to water, food health, education, income and work, peace and justice, political voice, social equity, gender equality, housing, networks and energy.

sustainmyplanet.com aims to redirect the journey of ‘Enlightenment ‘ onto a more sustainable course of action, by building on powerful human forces and tools that created this unprecedented agricultural and industrial revolution in the first place.

Specifically, rational thought, ingenuity, structure, science, technology, prototypes, programmes and projects, the forces of supply and demand economics.

The difference this time round is the planetary boundary factors are not footnotes or OPEX omissions they are the fundamental drivers from which success itself is measured

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