I’m sitting at my desk looking at a magazine spread full of graphs. All these graphs follow a trend of low to high – ie the line keeps moving upwards. Think about life, it’s full of climbing graphs:

• Life expectancy – people are living longer, diagnosis and treatment of disease has improved
• Temperature – warmer temperatures should lead to more vitamin D!
• Wealth – we’re all getting richer which means we have the money available to consume more – holidays, food, property, clothing, cars, gadgets, fuel
• Population – we find strength in numbers
• Profits – more sales, more money, more staff, more offices, more investment, bigger bonuses, higher salary

If everything’s on the up, this can only be a good thing, right?

The problem with this trend is that’s just not sustainable. What goes up must come down. By striving to be always on the up, we are setting ourselves up for an inevitable down. There will be a point where this line is going to start falling again.

Take population growth as an example. In the early stages of humans ‘arriving’ on earth, the best way to ensure survival was in numbers. In the early stages, humans were just a tiny spec on the planet. We dug wells, harvested small areas of vegetation, channeled rivers, dug mines and used the resources around us to build shelter. The more we reproduced, the more resources we needed to sustain ourselves. We started to turn meadows into fields to grow food. We chopped down areas of forest and mined raw materials to build homes. Over time, fields have been concreted over to build an airports, housing and cities. And he we sit at the crest of the peak!

If we continue at our current rate of consumption, we are going to run out of land suitable for farming, land for building houses and vegetation to soak up carbon dioxide. But the problem is we can’t put anymore ‘in’ and as a result we can’t get anymore ‘out’.

So what should sustainability look like?

A straight line.

Why not a circle?

A circle in theory is the perfect image of sustainability. But, a circle assumes we can start again from the beginning – when we draw a circle, we are connecting one point to another, the end to the beginning. A straight line has a beginning but has the capacity to continue forever. In order for the line to stay straight, we must put in what we take out – and this is truly sustainable.

Continuing our thoughts on population, we must find a way to control the rate at which people are born. Without such measures, our planet will not have enough resources to sustain us all.

Whilst browsing through a recent copy of Adbusters (July/August 2009) in our local magazine shop, it fell open on a single page article entitled “thinking the unthinkable”. The article, written by Tim Jackson sets the tone for our Blog Action Day posts:

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate, the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2010.

This extraordinary ramping up of the global economy has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology we depend on for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.

For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crisis aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our well-being.

The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find. The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People loose their jobs and sometime their homes. A spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.

But question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less that $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems we depend on for survival. It has failed spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.

Today we find ourselves faced with the imminent end of the era of cheap oil; the prospect (beyond the recent bubble) of steadily rising commodity prices; the degradation of forests, lakes and soils; conflicts over land use, water quality and fishing rights; and the momentous challenge of stabilizing concentrations of carbon in the global atmosphere. And we face these tasks with an economy that is fundamentally broken, in desperate need of renewal…

A message this clear needs little summary. Solving these issues must become a global priority.

With the launch of the toggle design laundry™ service a few months ago we have found we are now generating more reoccuring invoices than ever before. The dates and amounts of these invoices vary from client to client and on top of that we have quite a few hosting invoices to get out each month too. Our plan was to find an Open Source invoicing application that would generate recurring invoices, let us know if any are overdue and allow us to use our own invoice numbers (were picky about these things). It also made sense for this application to be online so we could access it from anywhere and give a login to our accountant if they needed it.

Siwapp

In terms of design this is the most promising of the three systems we tested. The layout is clear and the feature set is spot on for what we needed (although custom invoice numbers were not quite right). One thing that we really liked about it was the running total on the dashboard (seen above). The huge let down at this stage is the installation procedure. The application requires the Symfony framework to run and as a result needs plenty of command line attention and the correct web hosting environment to get it running. Siwapp shows real potential and is worth keeping an eye on.

Simple Invoices

The latest 2009 builds of Simple Invoices feel much better designed that the previous versions but unfortunately the application is still in beta. As a result it feels incomplete and the generated invoices look unprofessional. As a design agency we have always take great care over the presentation of our invoices and it was one of the main reasons we decided not to use Simple Invoices. Once again though it shows the potential to become an excellent tool.

phpBMS

phpBMS is a full featured business management tool featuring calenders, to-do lists, detailed user permissions, sales, products and invoicing. The interface is a little clunky but it feels together and stable. If you are just starting out your business then you may want to consider giving phpBMS a try – for us though all the extra features were overkill.

The winner is?

Having tried out a handful of options we decided to go with a product called The Invoice Machine. In this instance the Open Source options were not polished enough – we felt we needed a product we could trust and rely upon. So far The Invoice Machine has been excellent and the API means we can tie it into other systems if required. It also offers a full data export if we decide to go Open Source in the future.

My Riverford organic veg box arrived last week. For those not familiar with Riverford, each box contains a newsletter written by Guy Watson (Founder of Riverford Organic Farm). In this particular newsletter he was talking his motivations behind Riverford. These were similar to those behind toggle and the article struck a cord because it coincided with our launch of the laundry service.

“As Yasmina triumphed over Kate as Alan Sugar’s apprentice, we hear Sir Alan is to become a Lord and government advisor on enterprise. Brash, competitive and aggressively selfish behavior makes compelling viewing but has precious little to with good business. I can’t help enjoying the show; I even suspect there is a fair amount of integrity and honesty in the down-to-earth, finger wagging, boy-done-good Sir Alan’s approach, but sales and short-term deal making are just a small part of business. Most successful businesses spend far more time building long-term relationships with their suppliers and customers than they do striking short-term deals.

I stepped out of school in the unbridled market mania of the Reagan/Thatcher years. After a few years milking cows I packed my bags, bought a snappy suit and threw myself into the throng in London and New York as a management consultant. It was lucrative and great fun, but, for me, ultimately soul sapping and it was only two years before I was back on the farm. The unquestioning idolatry of the marketplace as the only valid solution, whether in education, health, climate change or school dinners continued unabated through the Blair/Clinton neo-liberalism. Meanwhile I grew my vegetables and business with an increasing sense that there must be a better way – and a determination to find it. My beef with the Sir Alan approach is that by viewing every object, person and situation as a trade commodity we ultimately belittle the human condition and denigrate our lives as a result….I may not have done as well as Sir Alan, but the belief that good business should be based on serving the genuine, long-term needs of all stakeholders is gaining ground.”

A fantastic lecture called ‘Morals and Markets’ by Professor Michael Sandel (something Mike had already passed around the toggle office) was mentioned at the end of the newsletter. If you are not already familiar with it, it’s definitely worth checking out. The lecture discusses the need for politics that encourage a more morally engaged public life – it looks at the moral limits of markets and how there are some things money can buy but shouldn’t. But that’s another blog post…