Noor Debets
Sustainability is a hot topic and when you search on Google you find many hits about what environmental sustainability is, the importance of it and countless of sustainable ideas and initiatives you can implement in your own life. Type in sustainability and your screen literally turns green when clicking on images. It strikes me that there are numbers of images where you see hands holding the earth or just earth in general. It made me think - Why is it such a widely used picture and what does it mean?
The image has probably something to do with the softness of our hands, and the way we should treat “our” earth gently with love and passion. Maybe it is about the need of planting a small seed, to create awareness, one-by-one. But it seems to me that this doesn’t cover the magnitude of the task of creating environmental sustainability at all. When I see our environment, our lifestyle; how we live, what we do, with whom, where, how and what we use to do, I notice that there is a big step to make towards a more sustainable earth. It is not that easy to change a lifestyle of hundreds of people. Just awareness is not enough.
Of Course we work hard to create numbers of new (technological) initiatives, innovative or not, and small seeds are planted. We have the Dopper bottles, buy second hand clothing, have solar cells on our roof and some of us eat less meat in order to life more sustainable. There is a variety in sustainable events and ideas, but is this enough to reach our 2020 sustainability goals? Is it true when there is said that every little helps? To plant a seed, so to speak, costs little effort but it has little impact too. Why not connect all those plans, communicate them all-in-one, in order to create large impact. Why not come up with a sustainable umbrella that covers more and has a holistic approach. We need grand gestures, so get rid of the image and so show me more hands.
Let's see what we can bring Texel.
Published by Noor Debets, 15th november 2015