GEOG 101

Day 25: Social Change for Environmental and Social

Sustainability

Housekeeping Items

• Talk by Giles Slade on Friday, author of a new book: Exodus: Climate Change and the Coming Flight for Survival. It will be at the VIU Library at 2 p.m.

• Today we’ll cover the topic of making social change to achieve great sustainability, and on Monday we’ll do a review for the final starting from freshwater ecosystems (Chapter 12) on.

• Definitely read all of Chapter 22 on environmental policy.• I did the math wrong when I said environmental legislation

went back 50 years. It’s actually been 40 years – to the early 70s, with another up surge in the late ‘80s, and various revisions to legislation in the late ‘90s, and then recently (and disastrously) under Harper.

• While environmentalism is not the dominant paradigm, it has grown enormously. In 1970, 20 million Americans came out to the first Earth Day rallies and activities. In 2010, half a billion came out in 175 countries!

Housekeeping Items• At the same time, as

resources get scarce, corporations and their governmental backers are mobilizing to make a last-ditch grab for the resources that are left, as detailed in Michael Klare’s book, The Race for What’s Left. This bound to heighten conflict.

Housekeeping Items• One issue we talked about last time was how growth in

GDP was not making more people better off. Here is a short video that illustrates that point: http://www.utrend.tv/v/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact/.

• When we think about defending the Earth and fomenting change, we don’t need to start from scratch. Almost 30 years ago, I came up with the idea of the “planetariat” (see also Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest). This was/is a group that was resisting the degradation of ecosystems, cultural homogenization as a result of globalization, and seeking to preserve the unique characteristics of local places.

• It consists of indigenous people around the world, small peasants and farmers who have lived relatively sustainably for generations, and members of counter-cultures (Quakers in the past, and hippies more recently).

Social Change• What do you think are the most effective ways of

achieving change, and where would you put the emphasis – on the individual behavioural level or on the institutional level?

• Arguably, we need both, and both kinds of change reinforce one another. Can you think of examples?

• I divide the strategies for achieving institutional change into four: electoral action & lobbying; policy development; influencing the public directly and through opinion-makers; direct action, both political and lifestyle.

• Similarly, affecting individual behavioural change has four dimensions: education; incentives and disincentives (moral and financial); promoting public discussion (turning consumers into citizens); providing alternatives.