Alex Steffen’s articles and think pieces over at worldchanging.com (1) often become the basis for a reflection over at the Y&H ESD Forum. This is fine and as it should be, except that Alex’s voice seems to remain a minority one. Here he is talking sense once more:

“We have inherited a whole set of solutions by conventional wisdom, many of them surrounding lifestyle choices. Almost all of us believe that someone who buys local food, who drives a hybrid, who lives in a well-insulated house, who wears organic clothing and who religiously recycles and composts and avoids unnecessary purchases is living sustainably.

They are not. As we've explored a bunch of times in different ways here on Worldchanging, the parts of our lives that actually fall within our direct control are the tips of systemic icebergs, and often changing them does nothing to alter those systems: not individually, not in small groups, not even in larger lifestyle movements. If we're going to avoid catastrophe, we need to change those larger systems, and change them for everyone, and change them quickly.

It's quite clear that some of the "solutions" we embrace don't actually motivate people to change at all. There's hard evidence suggesting that most of the time, small steps do not actually motivate people to later take larger steps (most people adopt a small change or two and then feel they've done their part and stop).

Other times, we ask people to pay attention to the wrong things. Though the efforts some contrarians' make to discredit local food verge on the absurd, the fact remains that food miles are not the most important measurement of food system sustainability. Perhaps more importantly, some observers' suggest that local food often serves as a substitute for systemic engagement in movements to change agricultural systems at the largest levels, and I think there’s truth there.”

His argument is not that we stop doing the small steps but that we re-contextualise them. At present we seem to have shrunk sustainability down to the size of something we can be personally responsible for (or not) when what we really need most is the bigger debate A look at the film Food Inc (3) or Daily Bread is as good a reason as any to search out artisanal local products but what are the drivers of dominant industrial food systems and what systemically can be done to promote more local, integrated and benign systems eg consider permaculture and organic systems (2). This is a discussion about corn subsidies and bureaucratic regulation, about farmer indebtedness, about too cheap fossil fuels and uncosted externalities, migrant labour and the concentration of power in key commodities.
Much ESD work has a bias towards ‘me and consumerism’ when it should be ‘systems and citizenship’. Without including that focus the scarcest resource of all, time, will have been used up to no meaningful end.
(1) www.worldchanging.com
(2) Introduction to permaculture and organic systems

http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/permaculture/

http://www.polyfacefarms.com

(3) Food Inc
http://www.foodincmovie.com/spread-the-word.php

Cartoon credit: Plenty magazine