Environment is already the dominant challenge of the 21st century. Barbara Heinzen’s first assignment in this area came from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, when she was part of a larger team led by Ged Davis in the late 1990s. Roughly fifty business people worked over 12 months to develop scenarios looking at the future of the global environment in the following fifty years. www.wbcsd.org/DocRoot/dtntHdPTlkbR35KCK6NF/exploringscenarios.pdf
One of the scenario stories, “Jazz”, postulated that markets would solve the environmental challenges we faced. But how would that happen? In answering that question, Barbara Heinzen wrote a paper titled “Can Markets Manage Ecosystems?” that contributed to the Jazz scenario and Barbara Heinzen’s book, Feeling for Stones.
This early paper also identified the need to engage politically with people across boundaries in order to manage serious environmental challenges. Green Cross International hired Barbara Heinzen to facilitate discussions on the Jordan River Valley in the Middle East and the Ogavango River in Southern Africa. In both cases, legacies of war and environmental stress complicated the ability to agree on future management. |
