This is a guest post from Jonathan Wise, a planner at Red Bee Media who’s starting the MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility at Ashridge this November.
I remember reading something about how best to use your time in relation to Climate Change. It said that it’s more effective to lobby your MP than recycle your rubbish. This is because if we all worked to change our MP’s minds which got them to change legislation, this is a far more productive way to tackle Climate Change than recycling bottles and tins of beans.
This kind of logic is exemplified perfectly in this TED talk by the impressive Jason Clay from the WWF.
He looks at the data and very quickly demonstrates that you can get an awful lot done by talking to just 100 companies who are responsible for a large minority of the world’s commodity markets which have the greatest environmental impact.
He talks about making sustainability a ‘pre-competitive issue’. You do this by getting major commodity producers to produce/extract their commodities in a sustainable which will help drive an entire commodity market to be sustainable. This means that consumers won’t have to choose between the sustainable and the non-sustainable option, because it will all be sustainable.
And it’s probably easier to convince 100 producers to ‘Supply Green’ than to convince 6 billion consumers to ‘Buy Green’.
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I love this. It’s great. It’s a really good way to think about making serious inroads, maybe even the first 20% of the shift we need.
But… it’s important to remember it’s not the whole story.
Why?
Because while we see sustainability as a purely material issue, we’ll always be f**ked. It’s first and foremost a values problem, and a framing problem.
A values problem because while we value success relative to others more than success on our own terms, we’ll go on wanting more and more and more and… so even if we’re consuming the most per-unit resource-efficient stuff in the world, we’ll end up consuming so many units that the efficiency gains will be lost (Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth is good on this, as is Guy Champniss’ first blog on this page)
A framing problem because we fundamentally need to move from understanding humanity as separate from nature to understanding humanity as part of nature. Again, without that shift, we will always see the natural world entirely instrumentally, and always ar5e it up.
Fundamentally, my point (to paraphrase Winston Churchill) is that if this issue was about doing what we can, this would be THE answer. Since it’s about doing what we must, it’s only a part of it.
Jon completely agree with your point about sustainability needs to be seen as a values problem, not just a material issue. And also the need to understand ourselves as part of nature rather than distinct from it.
However, as human beings we’re always going to value success relative to others more than success on our own terms. We’re social animals and this behaviour has been honed for 10,000 years as human beings and for millions of years before that as primates. It ain’t gonna change any time soon.
However, if as you say, we reframe our values, and hence what success means, then the idea of measuring yourself against others isn’t an issue per se, because you’re defining yourself less by what you have/earn/spend, and more by other measures that reflect a positive, constructive, sustainable relationship with the planet, and each other. E.g. (and i’m obviously making these up) how much time do i spend outdoors compared to you, how strong are my social bonds compared to yours, how little a footprint do i leave compared to you etc?