Can we move nations and people in the direction of sustainability?  Such a move would be a modification of society comparable in scale to only two other changes:  the Agricultural Revolution of the late Neolithic and the Industrial Revolution of the past two centuries.  Those revolutions were gradual, spontaneous, and largely unconscious.  This one will have to be a fully conscious operation...  If we actually do it, the undertaking will be absolutely unique in humanity's stay on the Earth.
	William D. Ruckelshaus (1989)

 
Ruckelshaus, writing 20 years ago, when Donella Meadows could notice and echo his statement, got so much right:

• a journey of nations and people in the direction of sustainability

• in the course of the journey, an enormous modification of society

• a fully conscious operation

• an unprecedented process is an option, if not a necessity

He brought to this declaration the insight that many, many people don't want and will vigorously resist having society recast in a proposed mold. They don't trust anyone, including a majority claiming the best intentions, with that responsibility.  They prefer familiar imperfections, wrongs and difficulties rooted in history to a thoroughly prescribed unknown.

How, then, to make the modifying operation attractive to an unprecedented number of people, practically all of them asking (as they've learned to do) what's in it for me?

Ruckelshaus conceived of a journey, an approach, to sustainability.  It meets important criteria.  Among other moves, the metaphor especially evokes emigration, the personal choice to relocate for a better life, imagined or promised. It's part of family history for so many.  In a sense, it's proven; people know they are beneficiaries.  Although it has one purpose, it also comfortably accommodates individuality – different points of departure, different initial views of the destination, different loads, strides and paces, different routes, different traveling companions, etc. – which is at risk, but when developed is a main ingredient of sustainable society.  We cannot get there without flourishing individuality everywhere.  And people will love finally being true to themselves, as recommended by the wise ones of all times and places.

But what sort of journey is the approach to sustainability?  People certainly are in all the best places!  Should they change places in a grand human shuffle, for the sake of change?  No.  In a world so full of people, in which nations' immigration policies are very controversial and lately dominant cheap energy resources are well on their way to sunset, emigration gets a makeover.  For most, there need be no perilous trip across a sea or hazardous trek over a border.  Instead there's awakening to and movement into present physical location, respective locales.  It's a journey because it's consciousness change and cannot happen all at once.

This is where fully conscious enters, in two ways; everyone participates increasingly as themselves where they can see and be seen, hear and be heard.  Because of disconnections, from places and people, created and enforced by buildings and other structures, highly powered mobility and global telecommunications, there's much that's new and engaging to see, hear, say and do in and with each settled area.

People will emigrate to where they are!  For the sake of sustainable give and take among flourishing individuals, relocation becomes relocalization.  We stay put, yet pioneer by setting new roots, connecting, exchanging and, thus, building a resilient and life-enhancing system.  In time, we discover what we can sustainably send to and reach for in the distance.

In humanity's fourth phase, we'll say we had more, but now we are more.