Fear and Hope or Vision and Commitment?

A lot of what I’ve seen written on the subject of sustainability seems quite focused on using fear and scare tactics to get people’s attention. The global population is growing exponentially, resource use per capita is also growing exponentially, demand for goods and services will only continue to grow as India and China’s populations start to exercise their economic power, the signs pointing to significant climate change are accelerating, we’re running out of oil and we can expect to see continued global conflict over resource allocation.

At the same time, we see almost the exact opposite reaction from the other side of the debate. There are a lot of folks who are blithely ignoring the problems in the hope that technology will come to our rescue. Increased efficiencies, higher productivity, the tremendous increase in computing power will continue to enable new fields like genetic engineering, we’ll find better and cheaper ways to drill for oil and mine our coal. No worries, mate - The best thing you can do to help the situation is to go shopping.

Both reactions tend to freeze any positive action in its tracks. For that reason, we need to move beyond fear and hope as our primary responses to the warning signs that are becoming louder every day.

Instead of reacting out of fear or hope, we can work together to create a vision for a sustainable future, a vision of a community and a world where we all want to live, a vision of a world we want to pass on to our children, a world that is better than the one we inherited. Then with that vision firmly in our minds, we must take the next step and make a commitment to ourselves, to our families and friends, to our local and global communities, that we will do something today and everyday to make that vision a reality.

Please help create a vision of a sustainable future. Leave a thought, an idea, or your vision of a sustainable future in the comments below.

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now." – Goethe