Does it end with COP 15?
Dear Lykke Friis and Connie Hedegaard, congratulation with your new jobs. Not easy ones to handle with massive challenges ahead.
In Denmark, it seems there is a tendency to think that the issue of climate change and sustainability as a possible solution is something we must focus on and debate until COP15 and afterwards we can forget about it. More and more often I hear people telling me they are sick of talking about climate change and sustainability. And that after COP 15 it will pass...
Well, I can just say that this is not going to happen. Maybe we will stop talking about it but it will certainly not be over. Cop 15 might turn out to be important but it is mostly a political declaration of intent and a frame for possible solutions but without following action it is worthless.
This is really not any kind of news. But still, I sometimes end up getting really disappointed and that is mainly due to the lack of will to think in new and innovative solutions. Thinking in new ways seems an impossible thing to ask for. We talk in technological fixes but newer dare to think about how we can reorganise the systems and infrastructures which frames our lives.
New and smart solutions are thought of in the same frames and discourses we have been thinking in for the past 100 years. We need to think beyond our existing frames. We need to do research beyond the patterns already drawn within existing power and economic structures. We need to invest in ideas and research that we can't predict the end result of but which might bring forward new innovative solutions.
What we need most of all is the courage to think beyond technical fixes where people are seen as rational beings living accordingly to the technical frames we set up for action and lived lives. We need the courage to follow roads we do not know the endpoint of. These are the roads we need to follow in order to combat future challenges. Sustainability - defined as a holistic concept of mutual dependences, not only environment - is a good place to start.
Comments
Hi Malene! I just had to let you know that I completely sympathize with the post. So many people I know have been getting discouraged recently since Obama's "non-binding" move and they tell me they just want to stop talking and thinking about it (it probably doesn't help that they're mostly college students who haven't had their dreams tested in the fire of the real world yet). They also don't seem to like it when I tell them that the issue of sustainability is not something we will "solve" since it would be a paradox to create something that sustains forever.
I think it's cool that this is a challenge that will always keep us occupied, though. We always have a reason to keep innovating and re-making ourselves. It's true that we should be happy with our achievements when we make them but we should never let ourselves be satisfied. And, if we truly are human, we never will be truly satisfied.
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