Resistance to sustainability?
A close colleague of mine has frequently said to me that he can’t understand why people in general are so resistant to change, given that the evidence of the unsustainability of our current patterns of behaviour is so strong. The evidence is there, he says, but people just ignore it, and continue heedlessly on in their unsustainable patterns of behaviour.
I think my friend is misconstruing the nature of the problem, and therefore the best way to address it. I don’t think that people are resistant to change in general. We have probably never lived in an era of such rapid and systemic change as today. But people do resist being told by others that they must change. They prefer to make up their own minds.
I also think that, from the perspective of people who do not spend their working life looking at the evidence, the picture is not quite as clear as my friend thinks. Most people live in a cloud of data smog, deafened by the cacophony of voices that make claims and counter-claims about nearly everything in life, not just sustainability issues. Their capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff is extremely limited, because there is too much chaff out there, because some of the issues are quite complex, and because they do not have, or want to spend, the time doing so.
It may also be that many people agree that change is needed but don’t see how they can change in ways that will actually make a difference. We tend to be stronger on the critique than on the solutions in the sustainability field.
Finally, we know that people are resistant to taking action if they feel others are not also acting. No one wants to feel they are the patsy for change.
These factors suggest that the problem is not so much a kind of generalized resistance to change as a lack of visible and tangible solutions that are both likely to make a difference and also be widely adopted. We need to focus more on the positive than the negative, more on the solutions than the problems, and more on compelling reasons why people should adopt the solutions we promote.