I enjoyed your posts. I would like more information about your consulting services. I look forward to speaking with you.

Jay Wesley
CEO MP Bio-Mass

libertyrequiresvigilance said: “I would agree there is a bit of a marketing challenge to achieve a more mainstream following of sustianiable living practices. I think Green is a superficial, shallow tag that has little depth. It is actually rather telling of how abstracted our connection with the living-world is. We cant find anything more emotionally resonant? Sorry, I’m getting off topic.

In my opinion, the larger obstacles come from our cultural narratives and fixated associations that connect us to western concepts/ideals like success and healthy living. Fixation? If you look at a sock, you see a sock… but if you really were forced to look beyond the sock (in a survival situation persay), you would see fabric stitched together to make a sort of foot covering. You might also see you could cut the fabric apart and make a rag, or something else of use. If you looked beyond the sock, you would no longer be fixated by its one common use.

If we can show that sustainability actually fits into our cultural narratives (how might a sustainable community revitalize the American Dream?), and expand the number of associations with certain ideas like success (that it can be other conditions apart from working in a job you don’t appreciate so you can consume stuff), then I think we’ll be on our way. We may also need to look at the way we set ourselves apart from other living things, especially in how we build our cities. Humans follow the same patterns we see in other living beings, why are we separated? How safe are we being removed from other animals?

Take a look at this video showing the green roof on the Vancouver Convention Center:
http://vimeo.com/5889280

Maybe we should ask ourselves why we were interested in sustainability. What tipped the scales one way or another? What kind of narrative does this fit in for me that it may fit into a similar narrative for someone intellectually different?

What do you all think?”

I enjoyed your post and found it be a very thoughtful analysis of why people might not embrace sustainability.

I would add two additional barriers, which are both inter-related as you mentioned: relevance and short-term thinking. First, the idea of sustainability just doesn’t seem relevant to some people in their day-to-day lives, and second, our cultural habit of engaging in short-term thinking makes it difficult to take the long-term perspective that sustainability (and systems thinking) require.

The interesting part about your post is that within each of the barriers you’ve identified lies a clue about how we can actually overcome that barrier, e.g., in messaging, drop the holier-than-thou approach; in idea acceptance, focus on telling the story rather than leaving people bleary-eyed with statistics, etc.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this important topic.

Carolina

P.S. @Rich Bruer – Check out the recent article in Good about conspicuous consumption vs. conspicuous expression – it relates directly to your comment. http://www.good.is/post/conspicuous-but-not-consuming/