Imagining a Better World Is First Step to Sustainability

Stephen Leahy

VANCOUVER, Canada, Feb 20 (IPS) – Humanity’s failure to halt the deepening planetary emergency of climate change, extinctions of species and overconsumption of resources is a failure of imagination and mistaken beliefs that we act rationally.

The path to a truly sustainable future is through the muddy waters of emotions, values, ethics and most importantly, imagination, said artists and social scientists at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference here in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“We don’t live in the real world but live only in the world we imagine,” said David Maggs, a concert pianist and Phd student at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Our perception of reality is filtered by our personal experiences and values. That’s why the “if we only knew better, we’d do better” education and communication paradigm isn’t working, Maggs said. The underlying assumption that a failure to become more sustainable is the result of a lack of information is flawed, he told attendees at what is the world’s largest general science meeting.

“We live in our heads. We live in storyland,” agrees John Robinson of UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability.

“When we talk about sustainability we are talking about the future, how things could be. This is the landscape of imagination,” Robinson told IPS in an interview. “If we can’t imagine a better world, we won’t get it.”

This imagining will be complex and difficult. Sustainability goes well beyond scientific facts to how we relate to nature and to ourselves, he said.

“We haven’t yet grasped the depth of changes that are coming,” Robinson said.

Science alone isn’t enough to make decisions about sustainability because it also involves our values and ethical concerns, said Thomas Dietz, Michigan State University assistant vice president for environmental research.

Information plays a much smaller role than we like to think, said Dietz. In order to truly address big issues like climate change or sustainability, we need to talk at a society-wide scale about our values, and reach mutual understanding about the values needed for sustainability.

“However, we don’t like to talk about our values or feelings because it threatens our personal identity,” he said.

Treating nature as an object, separate and distinct from us, is part of the problem, said Sacha Kagan, sociologist at Leuphana University in Germany. The current environmental crisis results from technological thinking and a fear of complexity that science alone cannot help us with, Kagan said.

The objectification of the natural world began about 300 years ago with the Age of Enlightenment. People saw the world and their place in it in very different ways before that, said Robinson. It is helpful to study how this change occurred. What’s clear is that sustainability won’t be achieved without “engaging people in numbers and at levels that have never been done before”, he said.

New social media tools like Facebook may help. “People certainly don’t like to come to public meetings,” Robinson noted.

Current approaches to help the public understand the implications of climate change such as graphs or iconic pictures of polar bears have limits and aren’t effective, said Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

“We need to find new ways to think about the future under climate change,” said Hulme.

One approach is to use art – not as propaganda tool but as a creative way to engage our imaginations, said Dietz.

“Art can provoke thinking and actually change people’s perceptions of the complex issues associated with sustainability science,” he said “When we’re considering questions about preserving biodiversity versus creating jobs, art can help us examine our values and have a discussion that’s broader than just scientific facts.”

It is tempting to believe the arts can help by softening and “prettifying” the message and bringing it to a wider audience, said award-winning photographer Joe Zammit-Lucia.

“We need to go much further to provide a different world view that can help us reframe the issues,” said Zammit-Lucia.

Society’s choices are driven by people’s perceptions of reality which is based on their values and the cultural context, he said. Experts and scientific knowledge, while helpful, are part of the problem: they dominate the discourse and narrow our vision of what’s possible.

“I also don’t buy in the idea we need to make the right decisions,” Zammit-Lucia added. :What we need is the right process, ways in which the public can fully participate.”