Designer
I have been thinking about change.
Specifically, I have been thinking about the difference between individual change and system change. These terms are prevalent in the climate change discourse, and often presented as a black-and-white, mutually exclusive choice. This is a false dichotomy.
Continue reading “Individual change or system change is not the right question”
2018 was a watershed year for public awareness of ecological and climate breakdown. I had heard about these crises many times over the years, however I never really thought about them in a focused way. Last year, I decided to start studying.
Information on climate change and biodiversity loss is like an endless ball of thread. You pull the thread and more comes out. You keep pulling, the same thing happens. Now several months in, I am still pulling that thread, and still learning. Information ever more curious, ever more serious, ever more disconcerting.
Below, I am highlighting some of the more unorthodox material that I have come across. This is not a comprehensive review but rather a few points and observations on each source, to give you an idea.
Continue reading “Exploring the fringe: Environmental breakdown vs. the System”
In the public imagination, the electric car – and the hybrid car before it – has been hailed as a key solution for consumers to reduce their environmental impact and help slow climate change.
As one indicator, web searches for Tesla are up over 450% from 2012 to 2018 peak, and the company is now valued at over US$54 billion on the stock market. The cars are selling, too: Tesla sales are up seven-fold from Q3 2015 to Q3 2018.
One core feature of globalised capitalism is that supply and demand, production and consumption are geographically separated. Consumers buying physical products have very little visibility into the supply chain and the participating organisations beyond the maker (the public brand) and the seller (the place of purchase). As consumers, we tend to stick with the story crafted by marketing and advertising, and assessing the sustainability of a product beyond this superficial understanding is a challenge we are not encouraged to take on.
Continue reading “On embodied emissions, exploitation and the unsustainability of consumer products”
Let’s start with an assumption:
We want to live meaningful lives on a healthy planet and we want the generations to come to be able to do the same.
And a related definition of true sustainability (Ehrenfeld 2009):
[Sustainability is] the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the planet forever
We are currently using 1.7 Earths each year. This means that ‘we use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate, through overfishing, overharvesting forests, and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ecosystems can absorb’ (source).
Our current way of life is deeply unsustainable.
