New thinking on water policy

Water is an essential overlay for all these policy areas. So how do we move forward and make decisions that account for and act with understanding for this interdependent relationship?

We need to include a fourth leg on to our triple bottom line planning. Why? When we lean on one leg, be it social, economic, or environmental we are leaning on one leg of a three-legged stool. We now need to add a fourth leg to our stool which provides a mechanism for balance. This fourth leg on our stool of our operation and business management is a spiritual perspective. There is a need to include a spiritual perspective, a moral and ethical new world view, to our way of working.

There needs to be a growth in our a spiritual capital which will enable us to blend positions and accept a mix of solutions which protect the natural resource of water equally and justly for all inhabitants of this country and the globe.

Our Indigenous peoples have been telling us this for a long time. These ideas are now being included in philosophical documents such as the Earth Charter, the Australia Institute’s Manifesto for Wellbeing and the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion.

We now need to incorporate not only emotional intelligence as a way of working, but work in a way that enables us to blend our divergent positions with an underpinning of a spiritual perspective that sees us as only part of the whole, not power over the whole. It requires organisational, cultural, and personal psychological change.

This change will only occur through consciousness raising and social and political change.

Organisational and individual education for change needs to be supported for this to occur. There is a need for legislation which requires all organisations to develop organisational change programs which supports the development of this spiritual capital around water, humans and the environment. It cannot be taught in the traditional sense, it is a shift from what is in our mind and our work to what is in our heart that says “we care and have an interest in preserving our environment”. This is a shift from our mind to our hearts and this needs to be experienced not instructed.

How does this need to happen? Well social change needs a population approach to have a shift in consciousness.

Experts in early childhood education have a strategy for children to build a balance between their left brain-right brain thinking which is called “baby brain gym”. It is a tool that childhood educators use to assist children to develop a balanced approach between their motor and creative skills.

We now need to develop and perhaps even legislate for sustainability education programs in all organisations which assist us as decision makers, students and academics to grasp this interdependence and spiritual perspective. This needs to be achieved through a program of education that provides us with experiences which supports us to go back to our childhood days and re-educate our minds to think and act differently. This technique is called “lateral midline training”.

In order to develop a spiritual perspective in organisations and in our own personal behaviour, we need to work together more closely for the “common good”.

This can be done at the same time as achieving our own business objectives if we have a firm understanding and conviction to the whole. We need to be taught how to see the connection between the perspectives of the social, business and political and physical scientist.