Table 6 - How do your projects help broaden definitions of sustainability beyond recycling?
A helpful analogy from Southampton: when you buy an apple at a supermarket, you can consider the social aspects of who grew it and in what conditions; the economic impacts of supply chain and wages and how your choices contribute to market forces; and the environmental implications of fertilisers, food miles and production methods. Something as simple and commonplace as buying an apple demonstrates the three pillars of sustainability.
Finding common interest
- Language can be a huge barrier, because many people hear ‘sustainability’ and automatically think ‘green stuff’ isn’t what they’re into. How can we frame things to make the issues feel as universally applicable as they actually are? Is making it an issue of ‘fairness and equality’ helpful? References to the future? Opportunity?
- Find which aspects of sustainability naturally overlap with people’s existing concerns. At Gloucestershire, healthy eating and nutrition was used to engage sports teams in what has now become a much further reaching programme of sustainability and behaviour change
- The local currency project at Falmouth beautifully ties together the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainability – demonstrating how big finance fuels environmental destruction, and opposing this through a localised economy builds stronger community resilience, enriching everyone.
Appealing to values
- We should more strongly resist accepting market-infused definitions of buzzwords like ‘employability’. Universities and corporates have a specific, unsustainable definition of what that means. SUs are uniquely placed to resist adopting the same measurements of success, and can develop careers services built around students’ values; how their work will fit into their life; and the contributions they want to make to society.
- Making more explicit the links between how social, economic and environmental sustainability supports widely shared, treasured values (self-acceptance, sense of community, wellbeing, fairness and equality etc.) can deepen engagement more strongly than constant warnings.
Sharing a positive vision of the future
- Nobody is empowered to act through fear, guilt or warnings. We need to paint a stark, ambitious picture of how society and planet can be enriched by pursuing sustainability
- A helpful resource mentioned on this subject was Futerra’s ‘Sell The Sizzle, Not The Sausage’ which is a quick, accessible read, and highly recommended.
- In moving beyond thinking of sustainability as ‘doing the recycling’ we have to transcend thinking of individuals doing less bad, and collectives doing more good. Sustainability can often meet derision owing to the reasonable argument that individual action can only go so far – and systemic change needs to be achieved too. Happily, this contributes to other values-led benefits, like social cohesion, community resilience, and providing meaning and purpose to people’s lives.
- Can we do more to collaborate between SUs regionally, particularly across HE and FE? Could these collaborations and resource sharing become part of the GI criteria?
- A fantastic idea from Birmingham which bridges individual and systemic change, while amplifying collectivist values: they’re putting solar panels on their halls. This will be accompanied by behaviour change campaign telling students: our new panels will reduce our carbon emissions by 6%. Can you make changes in your life to match us, and make it 12%?