The President of the World Bank advocates :
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An action plan always useful but all these people can’t avoid talking about financial benefits.
However talking about financial benefits can be an incentive to understanding for people who are constantly in denial, as these people see only the overconsumption and the overproduction, and the climate and the future of their children are their last concerns.
When I started studying sustainability, I noticed that the term consists of three "pillars". Already that raised my skeptical eyebrows, like the time the CEO of a company I was working at presented his plans for the future in the form of five "Olympic rings". The three pillars of sustainability are Ecology, Economy and Social. I also noted that my professors were talking about the economic sustainability all the time.
That puzzled me as they were all pretty bright people and that it quickly becomes pretty obvious, that when it comes to sustainability in our current situation, there is no need for pillars. It's all about ecology. If the biosphere collapses then there will be no economy in it's current form, and the social part will be less civilized than today, if any.
However, people working with sustainability are not more stupid than average. They know that people who make decisions also have money, and the reason they have money is that they understand and care about economics. It's their "religion". To get any sustainability idea realized, you have to have these people believe that it's an excellent idea, and appealing to their responsibility even towards their own kids, for some strange reason doesn't seem to work that well. On the other hand, if you can sell them something that is only slightly more profitable than what they currently have, then they're all ears.
When you then begin to understand how biology and the biosphere works, it's really not that strange. We are genetically coded to try and stay alive while reproducing our genes. To do that you need resources, and if it's you or the neighbor, then you live and the neighbor doesn't. At the same time we have become somewhat social on top of the more ego centered part of our behavior. Some are more social than others. "Research" has shown that you generally find students with least empathy among those studying politics, law and economics. It would be easy to say that those people are more jerks than the rest of us, but that wouldn't be entirely fair, considering that research also shows, that the good old debate about genes vs environment shaping ones character, is pointing more and more towards genes. A lot more than people thought in the 1970's when the debate was particularly strong.
All in all, as my friend says: It all comes down to economy and comfort, or as someone else called it, profit and laziness. I know it's not a popular thought, but it becomes a lot easier to understand human behavior if you take a few steps back, and do like Robert Sapolsky et al and realize/accept that humans basically are animals. We have been programmed by nature to primarily be concerned about our own survival, secondly about the survival of our offspring. You secure that by gathering and storing as many resources as you possibly can.
That is why sustainability seems like a dead idea, without first and foremost offering some sort of profit. It's actually and interesting battle, if it were not that we're all in the middle of it: Will civilization and culture, the social contracts etc. win over our basic instincts? I have personally started using the old "put your money where your mouth is" a lot recently when evaluating humanity's future. I try and consider what odds bookmakers would give. There are a lot of Utopian ideas these days. When it comes to the battle between rationally securing our future vs our personal programming, I'm afraid the odds are higher on the latter.
www.bbc.com
www.theguardian.com
