Block 1. Comms, Media & Sustainability

This block invites you to think (in English of course) about both your role and consumption activities as an individual citizen of the planet and your profession working with ICT, communications and the media.  For me your profession represents both a ‘stumbling block’ and a possible and vital force for change in the world’s sustainability aspirations.

Let me explain a little….to set the scene.  I’ll try to do so with a quote (me!), if you don’t mind:

« We have become a runaway, economically-driven, consumption-led society.  The engine of Capitalism requires it – it is fueled by our ‘wants’ and ‘desires’ [rather than any attempt to share the planet’s resources fairly on the basis of genuine personal ‘need’ and according to the planet’s ability to supply and regenerate resources].  Meeting only such ‘needs’ would result in far less production, economic activity and therefore profit and is therefore unacceptable to shareholders who desire maximum rather than optimal returns.

These ‘wants’ and ‘desires’ are created and stoked by ‘Marketing’ which I would define as:

« The art of making us want what we don’t really need. »

These consumption ‘lusts’, when married to:

• built-in obsolescence,
• peer pressure
• image, fashion and ostentatious consumption

represent an all-powerful momentum and an implacable inertia which militate against a shift towards a more sane and rational, sustainable approach to the utilisation and allocation of resources based upon real need, fairness and necessary limits imposed by the planet’s ecological means to support life now and in the future.

For me ‘we’ (citizens of the world) are like Nero, playing the fiddle while Rome is burning, us sitting on the branch of a tree merrily sawing off the bough between us and the trunk, or the famous ostrich with its head buried in the sand!

What are we going to DO about this situation: past generations have made it our problem and our children and grandchildren are going to pay for it: unless we act they are going to start live with a massive burden upon their shoulders.

This is borne out by recent news. In January 2015 Oxfam revealed that just 1% of the world’s population ‘owns’ over half of its entire resources – up from 44% at the last reading.  If it continues like this we are heading for calamities and wars the like of which we have never seen with unstoppable millions (as I put it in an article I wrote in 1990): ‘Walking for Water’ and ‘Fighting for Food’. Darfur and Lampedusa are, sadly, just  an early foretaste of what is to come

UNLESS…..

UNLESS we decide to DO something about it.  But do we have the WILL?

JFK’s speech of June 1963, concerning the need to eradicate the threat of a global superpower nuclear war, included the phrases:

« Our problems are man-made – – therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – – and we believe they can do it again. »

The threat is different this time but no less real and the solution is still within our grasp.  »

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SO, what is our role / duty?

How might the power of ICT, communications and media (in which you are specialists) be harnessed to shift this ‘supertanker’ of a problem in the direction of sanity and sustainability?

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How are we going to ‘attack’ the matter?

1. Seek to understand the above quotation and the nature of the dilemma
2. Brainstorm our own definitions of ‘sustainability’, compare them with the acknowledged and ‘expert’ definitions in order to create a ‘master’ definition.
3. Find examples/evidence of what might be called ‘crazy consumption and production’ (wants gone mad)  and compare it with basic needs of life which for some (many?) go unfilled.
4. What theory might help?  A. Maslow’s ‘Heirarchy of Needs’?  E. Rogers’ Diffusion and Adoption of Innovations’ model.   et. al.
5. The consequences of doing nothing
6. The ‘Call to Action’
7. Now let’s PERSONALISE IT.
   1. Do your own footprint test and see how many planet Earths we would need if everyone consumed like you!  Go to: http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/
   2. Do ‘a day in the life’ of YOU…. consider what you do, how you act, what you don’t do and should do perhaps…. Give yourself a score between 10 (perfectly sustainable) and 0 (not at all sustainable)
   3. Identify where you could do better and what is stopping you (the ‘inhibitors’).
   4. what might be the solutions to the inhibitors and how and by whom might they be brought about? If we can understand what is stopping us – we will probably find that it is the same list for others…..
8. What could / must be done?  What is our strategy to achieve it?
9. How can ICT and you in your communications and Media role support and drive the realisation of this strategy.

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Outputs.

Various, as directed, but I think we should definitely put them in two ultimate forms:

• a blog / website which explores your personal and professional discoveries
• at the end a letter to Segolène Royale as Minister of the Environment urging action and the implementation of some of your solutions as outlined on the blog.

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