The Seven Errors in the Game of Sustainability:
Identifying and changing paradigms before it’s too late
Y&R Brazil, 2012
The year is 2019 and the three Moirai are watching TV. The ten years time that the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen established as our deadline to reverse the tendency of global warming – or at least to keep the increase of the planet’s average temperature below 2ºC – has passed.
Leading scientists in that field announce, “Governments, companies and consumers failed equally in playing their parts and now it might be too late. But we will keep on trying”.
The three deities responsible for Man’s fate have distinct reactions. Clotho, who spins the thread of life, and Lachesis, who weaves and wraps them one by one, are paralyzed. But Atropos sharpens her scissors. She anticipates that she will need to cut them all and must fulfill her role. It is a matter of time.
When it comes to survival, there is no better narrative resource than these three characters from the Greek mythology – the three weavers of Fate. So much that imagining the responses described above is enough for the reader to ask himself or herself the following questions:
- Do you think that, by 2019, we will really have failed to reverse the tendency of global warming?
- IIs that due to the fact that the climate change is not perceived as something really serious?
- Is the problem in the infeasibility of the socioeconomic changes proposed as solutions?
If you have answered “yes” to the three questions, I invite you to read this booklet, which, in respect of the urgency of the theme, was printed with the purpose of anticipating a transmedia project I am currently working on.
Many organizations and people have been making huge efforts to be more and more sustainable: they recycle their waste, they save water and electricity, they prioritize the acquisition of “green” inputs and they invest in initiatives to promote biodiversity. They try and strive, but they don’t get anywhere.
Don’t you sense the same powerlessness within your company? If you are honest, your answer will be affirmative, just like mine is. As much as our intentions are the best possible, most of our efforts have been innocuous, as if everything we do became greenwash in face of the real dimension of the problem.
My thesis is that we are making seven major mistakes in our quest for sustainability. I will share them with you in the following pages and I daresay that, if we do not change our approach to the issue, the Moira Atropos might really sharpen her scissors and turning the metaphorical death of the planet into a reality some decades from now.
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The Seven Errors in the Game of Sustainability (pdf, 672 Kb)