Gabriel Grant
Yale University
Gabriel Grant is a new father, the director of the Byron Fellowship Educational Foundation, an organizational leadership and sustainability consultant, and a doctoral candidate at the Yale Center for Industrial Ecology. He holds an M.Phil. in leadership and sustainability from Yale University, and a M.S. in ecological systems engineering and a B.S. in physics from Purdue University. His academic, professional, and non-profit ventures are committed to the dream of all life flourishing together through people experiencing their life as a calling. His family's purpose is to powerfully contribute to others.
Transforming sustainability: Motivations for a sustainable world
What motivates us to survive is not what would have us thrive. External or controlled motivations (e.g., environmental scarcity and pollution) will drive us toward minimizing unsustainability, but will fall short of creating the world we want. By distinguishing between the problem oriented minimization of unsustainability and a possibility or vision oriented sustainability, we can more clearly articulate how expressions of autonomous, intrinsic, or self-determined motivation are the driving force of a sustainability characterized by individual and planetary flourishing in contrast to a sustainability characterized by survival. Building from self-determination theory, a model for vision is designed to create access to generating and sharing autonomous motivation for sustainability. Finally, several suggestions are offered for empirical research along with practical recommendations for building autonomous motivations for sustainability within one's own life, community, or organization.