A practical path to sustainability
SThe overall approach is one of identifying peoples’ and communities’ needs, for food, energy, transportation, housing, etc. — not necessarily to tell them what sustainable choices to make, but rather how to make those choices that are relevant to them.
OME time ago, the results of a survey of Filipinos revealed that “climate change” is not a top concern among the public, but that rather more everyday issues of food security, employment and manageable household expenses are at the top of most peoples’ list of priorities. That revelation suggested to us that a comprehensive change of approach is needed in the way climate change is addressed and communicated to the public.
It is not that climate change is unimportant, in fact, quite the opposite; virtually, every one of the day-to-day cares of ordinary people are affected in some way by climate change. Therefore, it should not be addressed as a separate, distinct concern as it seems to be now. We do not live in circumstances in which there is “climate change” and “everything else”; rather, climate change is a part of everything, and our attempts to address it must proceed with that in mind.
The end goal of that perspective is “sustainability,” which was the subject of The Manila Times’ latest forum last Thursday. Sustainability, or rather how it is manifested, can mean different things to different people depending on their own circumstances, but a broad definition of it is, “meeting the needs of the present, without compromising the right of future generations to meet their needs.” Obviously, if we destroy the environment and alter the climate to turn Earth into an uninhabitable hothouse, we take that right away from the future.
But in order not to render our species extinct, human society must undergo a fundamental change; we cannot expect that the economic, social and political frameworks that created the climate crisis in the first place are going to be able to solve it. The proof of that is the stark reality that, nearly 30 years since the world first embarked on a global-scale effort to address climate change, virtually every meaningful indicator — the amount of greenhouse gases we emit, the amount of plastic we produce, the volume of oil and gas we pump out of the ground — continues to increase, year after year, with detrimental and sometimes disastrous effects that are becoming more obvious to everyone.
The current top-down, world-scale approach is not working, because it is an attempt to make a giant leap all at once, and in doing so, all but ignores the all-important first part of the definition of sustainability, “meeting the needs of the present.” People can and do change, and do so willingly, but only according to their own context, their own needs, abilities and aspirations. Each individual effort may only be a figurative pebble in scale; but put enough of them together and they make a mountain.
What made Thursday’s forum so exciting and encouraging is that our diverse group of esteemed speakers provided practical ideas about how to achieve sustainability and shared examples of how they are working toward it. The overall approach is one of identifying peoples’ and communities’ needs, for food, energy, transportation, housing, communications, waste management, and above all, education — not necessarily to tell them what sustainable choices to make, but rather how to make those choices that are relevant to them.
It is a refreshing approach, and we believe one that is a great deal more relatable to people than abstract prescriptions and goals that, while desirable, are almost certainly unattainable in a timeframe that can be visualized by most people. The approach is one that offers the exciting prospect that, instead of making sustainability something that everyone must actively think about all the time, makes it something that is a habitual part of daily life. That is as it should be, and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said it best in a short video message shared by Climate Change Commissioner Albert de la Cruz Sr.: Climate change is our new normal; we can no more separate it from our daily lives and activities than we could the Covid-19 pandemic during those long months that threatened the entire world.