After more than seven years training and accrediting professionals to work in the emerging discipline of sustainability management, The Closed System’s principals concluded that a new approach was needed - one that integrates and incorporates:

• holistic and systems thinking: the inter-relationships involved in all aspects of management practices
  
• adherence to the natural principles underpinning healthy, growing and productive eco-systems:
  the only long-term basis for sustainability; and
• synergy between business/economic sustainability and personal sustainability: to ensure that benefits to individuals and social groupings are shared.

‘I first formed the impression that nature is a model, and then I realized that is not so — nature is the real thing, and we have, in the industrial system, a very poor artifice that needs changing. We can look to nature for the inspiration, the guiding principles to make the changes needed in the industrial system to make it as effective as nature is — waste free, resource-effective and resource-efficient, benign, operating on sunlight the way nature operates on sunlight; taking nothing and doing no harm.

I had a conversation with [former ISyE School chair – Georgia Tech] John Jarvis somewhere along the way. I said. "John, if you can figure out how a forest works, you will have a pretty good idea of what the industrial system for the 21st century ought o look like’.
  - Ray Anderson CEO Interface Carpets

There was mounting evidence in scientific and management circles that greater sustainability results when human behaviour is aligned with natural systems.

Using this evidence as a basic tenet, The Closed System developed an approach, called ‘The Closed System,’ which is based on ten principles to support businesses and people to become more sustainable.

Natural resources that combine to form the ‘web of life’, all function in short timeframes (individual lifecycles) as ‘closed systems’. Species cannot survive outside of their natural habitat and all of their natural behaviours are based on managing relationships within clearly defined ecosystems. Over long timeframes all natural systems are ‘open’, but viewing living systems as ‘open’ is not constructive when studying behaviour.

Aligning human behaviour with eco-system behaviour therefore becomes a major focus in education for sustainability.

“We cannot have well humans on a sick planet. We cannot have a viable human economy by devastating the Earth’s economy. We cannot survive if the conditions of life itself are not protected.

Not only our physical being, but our souls, our minds, imagination and emotions depend on our immediate experience of the natural world.

There is in the industrial process, no poetry, no elevation of mind or emotions comparable to that experienced in the magnificence of the sea, the mountains, the sky, the stars at night, the flowers blooming in the meadows, the flights and songs of the birds.

As the natural world diminishes in its splendour, so human life diminishes in its fulfillment of both the physical and spiritual aspects of our being.

Not only is it the case with humans, but with every mode of being.

The well-being of each member of the Earth community is dependent on the well-being of the Earth itself”.
  - Thomas Berry (Eco-theologian and cultural historian
    Author of many works including ‘The Dream of the Earth’)