Weekly Poll #3:
Achieving Sustainability: How Much Do You Really Care?
To round out this week’s orientation on the blog around sustainability, capitalism, and what it all ultimately means, I was curious about how some of us rationalize or privately deal with the challenges that an increasingly less sustainable world poses. Personally, I ended this week’s post on the subject of zero-growth with an assertion that unless we somehow “overthrow ourselves” and change our assumption that more “stuff equals better lives” – instead of just blaming today’s corporations – we are inevitably heading towards a bad, bad place.
The practical reality of this appeal, as expected, is that it is of course significantly easier to articulate a problem and call to action than to actually, well, act on it. Assuming you buy into the idea of “overthrowing ourselves,” how would you propose we do this? How are you doing this already? If actions measure the degree of our “caring”, … how much do you really care, at the end of the day, that our way of life is guaranteed to be unsustainable, which will force either us or our children in our lifetime to make drastic, likely painful changes to what some of us consider necessary conditions for comfort and happiness?
But this week’s poll is not about understanding your recycling habits or asking for the number of organic tea labels in your pantry. More specifically, I am first interested if you agree with my assertion that the core problem of sustainability is based on our explicit demand for more goods, and if a change in this demand would have a greater impact than all corporate sustainability efforts combined. If you agree, then I am curious if you would be willing to change your habits even if nobody around you would. No judgment here, but I personally suspect this route is tough at best, if we look at it honestly.
As always, please do feel free to share any suggestions for future polls you may find interesting to learn more about your fellow Good Generation comrades and their views on various topics. I’d be happy to pick up on some of these ideas in the future.
