Sustainably traditional or Traditionally sustainable?
I’m catching up on my blog entries for Master Degree in Sustainability with Cambridge and this is my last one. Let’s face it, if not the risk of failing on my diploma, I would never start blogging about my life… In my very static and old-schooler brain professionals don’t blog… Unless blogging is a part of their profession…
But, let’s stop here for one second and re-cap… What blogging did to me — it actually helped me to understand what is the focus of my sustainability leadership.
Before I was convinced that adopting high personal and professional sustainable standards was enough. I like it Swedish way: I’m a big believer of “walking the walk” without “talking the talk”. And therefore, my first move was to write about how beautifully sustainable my life was: everything around me is renewable, recyclable, re-usable, compostable and hybrid (well because when you have -20C and 2 meter of snow outside, the full EV turns into a piece of furniture).
However, as I was going through the course, I comprehended one very important thing: sustainability is not one size unisex pyjamas! My lifestyle is made possible by the area and country where I currently live. It is almost imposed on me at times by locally adopted way of life and community rules. Therefore, whatever I write about ME, will have zero relevance to 95% of the globe, as sustainability should build on and into the local social realm to be effective!
This made me think about my leadership style in the field and the fact that before assuming a leadership, you have to localise and understand the reality of people you are talking to. As I pointed out in my previous post, sustainability, as controversial as it sounds, currently is not on top of the priority list for most of people. So before preaching about unrelated and highly theoretical concepts, one should start with investigating into “what actually is on top of the priority list?”, “What drives peoples’ actions in this country / area / community?”. Ultimately, sustainability is exactly about moving from neo-liberal ME to softer and conscious US. US that includes all facets of sustainability from social to environmental.
And when it comes to understanding people, the best information medium are traditions. Which brings me to the next point of this post. Traditions in context of sustainability: big help or major obstacle?
I bet if you type in this sentence into Google Scholar or other academic search engines, the system will spit out 500+ results on the matter. But this is my blog and despite the fact that it is “peer reviewed”, it is not scientific or academic — it is to make me think and question…
So, traditions… I mentioned previously that in order to integrate the sustainability into lives of ordinary people across the world, you have to make the concept a part of Pop culture. And what is more pop / folk than traditions? But how do you change something that was forming to centuries? Who is in charge of traditions? What is the gap between the relevance of the tradition and modern life issues?
For instance, traditionally we still celebrating the abundance and plenty, but how relevant the horn of plenty is in the world where anything and everything can be bought and delivered by Amazon? In the same time, traditionally we celebrate the nature and its offerings, so how to distyle the traditions and make them popularise the sustainability concept?
It is something that I am to investigate further at this stage, so probably I should stop writing and start googling.
Have a good day…