Welcome to the Sustainable Methods Institute

The Sustainable Methods Institute is an international, environmental, health, economic and societal think tank, institution of higher education, and research network which aims to build a education, research and outreach institute that encompasses all fields of sustainable research. This institute will to a large degree remain virtual, that is, online to keep efficiency up and costs down. SMI will provide all the resources that a research institute provides. We will work towards a unified goal of sustainability by considering all aspects of sustainability holistically for all the projects under our guidance.

SMI's vision statement

  • A sustainable world where people no longer spend nature's limited assets as income. A world that considers the needs of future generations as well the need of the present generation.
  • A world, where the next generation is always left with more natural resources and better means to use them than the previous generation.
  • SMI would like to encourage everyone take find one new things they can do to help the planet every day.  You don't have to do it all at once, but one more "good deed" every day really helps.

SMI's mission statement:

  • Creating efficient decentralized open-source solutions of an appropriate scale to the problem and pointing people towards them.

There are three parts SMI's operations which are covered by the education, research, and policy program respectively.

  1. We have to teach this understanding to everybody in society. It is no good if it is just a bunch of experts talking disconnected from everybody else. One major problem with ecological awareness (awareness is a really bad word ... we need to be more than just aware, we need to live according to these principles) is that most people are too busy to care about these issues because they are not relevant to their status quo lives of paying bills, going to work, advancing their careers, and watching CSI and college football. This is an educational effort. I think to teach anyone anything, you have to make them want to learn for a reason.  This is why we are starting a global, online post-graduate university.
  2. We have to understand how individual human behavior leads to aggregate effects (so-called emergent behavior) and how our behavior changes (the technical term is react) the environment (CO2 pollution, species loss, climate change, ... ) and lately, as we reach our limits, how the environments acts back on us (peak oil. food insecurity, water depletion). This describes it in the very broadest sense. We also have to understand what leads a culture to believe in infinite growth, dominion over nature, birth rates, ...   Our research covers a broad range, from the latest high-technology to the most social issues.
  3. Whereas the above is more of an individually inspired effort, we also intend to make suggestions and create technology that is implementable on a grander scale. I think this is where the "Methods" of our name comes in. Hopefully we will find procedures that are more sustainable than the current methods in operation. Maybe this requires new technology or maybe it just requires a universal change in behavior either via policy or personal initiative.  From this we office policy guides and consulting.