The year is 1972. Disco is big, pants are flared, and the Watergate scandal is rocking the US. It's also the year the first UN conference on the “human environment” is held, marking 5 June as a day of global awareness around the need for positive environmental action. During a time of wide-spread disillusionment with government and growing civil unrest, the challenges the world faced were both very different and very similar to the ones we're grappling with now, almost half a century later.
As we look back this World Environment Day to what has changed since that initial declaration, it's startling to realise that in terms of advancing environmental and social sustainability, not all that much.
They are the small cogs turning a big wheel.
Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor, ITWeb
Some of the points in the 1972 declaration could easily have been written for today's landscape, like the observation that through the “rapid acceleration of science and technology, man has acquired the power to transform his environment in countless ways and on an unprecedented scale”. We still face a situation where, as quoted then, “millions live far below the minimum levels required for a decent human existence, deprived of adequate food and clothing, shelter and education, health and sanitation”. The only difference is we've had four decades of social, political and technological development to help do something about it... with little to show.
This is why the theme for World Environment Day 2012 is particularly significant: it asks whether the green economy includes you, and touches on some essential requirements for creating a truly sustainable future. On the one hand, each one of us, like it or not, is included in the green economy simply by being part of modern society, with its great shifts in economic sentiment and behaviour. On the other, there's a passiveness to this involvement that renders it inert. Many of us continue life just as we or our parents did 40 years ago; buying the same produce at the same supermarket chain - without knowing where it comes from or how it's made - carrying it away in the same plastic bags - even though they now cost 40 cents a pop - and driving home in the same kind of petrol-consuming vehicle that collectively have added billions of tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere in the past 40 years.
It's not a malicious attempt on people's part harm the environment; it's just that the idea of a green economy hasn't filtered through yet. But it also means that virtually anyone can get actively involved without drastic changes in lifestyle or comfort. Every person that consciously saves energy, or recycles regularly, or supports a brand that is environmentally responsible, is involved in the green economy. They are the small cogs turning a big wheel. At the same time, numerous opportunities exist for individuals to make a more direct and enduring contribution to a low-carbon economic model. Countless innovators, from Barcelona to Burkina Faso have developed solutions that combine local needs with social and environmental concerns.
The “Where to get it” solution in Fukuoka, Japan, for example, provides transport and city information via a location-based platform that integrates mobile, geospatial, local search and social networking technologies, promoting the use of public transport and rating businesses that employ environmentally-friendly practices. Or there's the Internet-enabled vehicle that combines the efficiency of a motorcycle with the safety of a car, featuring car doors and a steering wheel but just two wheels and an electric motor. Or the joint-venture company in Mozambique that makes clean-burning ethanol from the widely available cassava crop, for use as cooking fuel by a largely poverty-stricken population.
This trend of combined social and environmental solutions intersects with two other major developments shaping the global landscape: mass unemployment and technological advancement. As demonstrated by the above examples, the combination offers limitless opportunities for a truly transformed economy and society.
Call of our time
For all the upheaval it caused, the global recession also did something useful to the global psyche - it forced us to rely on the power of human ingenuity and created entrepreneurs out of the most unlikely of candidates. It rekindled the spirit of innovation through necessity, and this spirit can easily be extended to areas of the green economy, as we head into a future of global unemployment and massive environmental challenges.
The world's population will likely hit nine billion by 2050, not only putting huge additional pressure on already strained resources, but also meaning millions more will be in search of jobs. Globally, there is an unemployment backlog of 200 million, with half a billion more joining the job market over the next decade. If we're to move to the green economy model described by the UN: “one that brings improved human wellbeing and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities”, then creating green jobs is not simply a noble goal, it's an absolute imperative. And everyone has a role to play in this establishment of these jobs, whether heading up the organisations that will create them to buying the products and services they offer, to partaking in processes like recycling and efficiency that will characterise new ways of doing business. The green economy can and must include every individual if it's to be the transformative force for change it promises.
Looking at another transformative change that's taken place over the past 40 years offers key lessons for how this could play out. Information technology also started out as something that wasn't considered particularly inclusive. It was thought of in terms of huge machines behind closed doors and the average Joe didn't encounter it in a tangible form on a daily basis. Only with the explosion of personal computing and the miniaturisation of devices did ICT become a central and personal part of our lives. Sure, the transition from business people with bulky Nokias to pre-teen children carrying BlackBerrys didn't take place overnight. But our world is different now in ways we could never have imagined a few decades ago.
The green economy needs to follow a similar trajectory. For too long it has been a topic discussed at conferences and sprinkled throughout political speeches. It needs to become something that is ubiquitous, that's ingrained in culture and part of life without our even thinking about it - something that includes each and every 'you'. The information age changed way we thought about and approached virtually everything; the green economy needs to do the same, and we can't wait another 40 years for it to do so.
So as we celebrate a day dedicated to our shared environment, there's an opportunity for reflecting on how we're personally included. The words of a woman who is embedding green economy principles into one of the world's biggest brands capture the true power of leveraging individual involvement in a shared problem: Nike's VP of sustainable business and innovation, Hannah Jones, puts it down to collective intelligence and diversity of thought: “To me creativity is born out of bringing people with very different approaches to problem-solving, very different insights, together and saying 'you can do this; we can solve this together'. To me it's all about how do you unleash the creativity in teams and in people by having them focus on things that make them passionate, and have them say, 'if I can solve this, if I can be a hero in this, I could actually change the world."
Share