India, Sustainable Lifestyles and Choice Editing

[Valerie Brachya]

A while ago we had a fascinating discussion on Scorai following my question on the use of the term sustainable lifestyles by India's Prime Minister at the Glasgow summit. Today a representative of India was the keynote speaker in the UNEP/Hotorcool event launching a policy paper 'enabling sustainable lifestyles in a climate emergency'.

https://hotorcool.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Enabling-Sustainable-Lifestyles_UNEP.pdf

 India continues to present itself as a world leader in the right lifestyle for climate change and that changes of behavior and lifestyles are more important than setting long term goals for 2050. Scorai members may have their doubts!!

However Magnus Bengtsson did convince participants that choice editing could be an effective way of facilitation towards demand reduction by editing out high consumption, editing in alternative need satisfiers and ensuring equitable access. One example given was collaborative consumption and sharing products.

 At one time I was convinced that collaborative consumption and the sharing economy would be a gamechanger for sustainable lifestyles. Research has however indicated that sharing and collaboration does not necessarily reduce demand - in fact it can even result in increased consumption, demonstrated by how shared mobility detracted people from public transport but not from their cars.

So we need to check carefully for possible undesirable consequences of policy proposals and see how they can be edited out .

The webinar was recorded and should be available on 10YFP channel on Youtube.

Valerie

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Valerie Brachya

Research Associate

Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research

Lecturer, Tel Aviv University, Porter School for the Environment and Earth Sciences

Co-author 'Sustainable Lifestyles after Covid 19'

[Tom Abeles]

I am confused. Editing out and adding in? Given the remarks at COP26, what would Greta Thunberg say to "editing" (more blah, blah, blah)?

For a number of persons who are involved in the developing "south" in general and particularly wrt India and Modi's BJP, just looking at the recent year-long agricultural  protests in context, rhetoric and reality in such a complex continent seems far from congruent. This is a dense topic deserving of serious discussion

I agree that the sharing economy as touched on by Valerie may be questionable in practice, just checking to see that  it is sustainable, duplicable and transferable. Ted Trainer has volumes on this topic and, interestingly there is a suggested path in Neal Stephenson's SF novel, The Diamond Age  But that is another discussion since SCORAI's Ashley Colby has field experience.

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[Rahul Goswami]

Is there text or a document online with the comments by the representative of India? Thanks, Rahul

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[Ashwani Vasishth]

and that changes of behavior and lifestyles are more important than setting long term goals for 2050.

At one time I was convinced that collaborative consumption and the sharing economy would be a gamechanger for sustainable lifestyles

that sharing and collaboration does not necessarily reduce demand - in fact it can even result in increased consumption

-- 
     Ashwani
        Vasishth         vasi...@ramapo.edu          (201) 684-6616 (Jabber-enabled)
                   http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~vasishth
          --------------------------------------------------------
                      Professor of Sustainability
                  Convener, Sustainability Program (BA)
President, New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS)
                    Director, Center for Sustainability
                     http://ramapo.edu/sustainability

 Set up an Appointment with me, at: https://calendly.com/vasishth/advisement

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I respectfully acknowledge that Ramapo College is located on the ancestral and traditional Indigenous territory of the Ramapough Lenape Nation.

[Tom Abeles]

[Ashwani Vasishth]

Hullo folks,

I'm sorry for the late reaction...end-of-an-extraordinary semester had me crunched and pulled in so very many directions.  But it was all worth it.

Thanks, Valerie, for provoking thought.  You do this well.  And Tom, for keeping this front and center for me.

A few points that I thought particularly impactful.  Happy to discuss, off-line or on.

and that changes of behavior and lifestyles are more important than setting long term goals for 2050.

Yes, i do agree.  As Bill has drawn our attention to, repeatedly and effectively, overshoot will get us long before--and more certainly--any bogeyman ever will.  Well, perhaps not "get us," but certainly the root source of everything we are up against.  As Donella Meadows advised...yea so many decades ago--go as far up-stream as you possibly can.  And this get us pretty close.

At one time I was convinced that collaborative consumption and the sharing economy would be a gamechanger for sustainable lifestyles

Yes, of course.  Wouldn't it be entirely marvelous if we could find that chimeral "magic bullet?"  Pipee dreams do come easy to us humans.

that sharing and collaboration does not necessarily reduce demand - in fact it can even result in increased consumption

Well, planners, particularly transportation planners, discovered this ages ago.  Latent demand.  Free up capacity by adding highway lanes,and it almost instantly fills up again, with all those folks that opted out when things were congested, and now choose to jum right back in.

But to return to the topic dearest to a discussion Tom and I have been having...India.  Its easy to shrug off what the spokesperson said as hyperbolic.  But it's not simply that.

I've pointed this out before.  In a "wicked problems" world--complex, organic, evolutionary world, which is where we squarely are--two memes MUST fall quickly by the wayside.

• We must--imperatively--delete, purge make un-happen the very idea that such problems can EVER be "solved."  They never can, because, as Darwin showed us way back in 1859--and to which we still remain impervious--when what we ar trying to affect will not sit still, then the very notion that we can "solve" things that respond, react and adapt to each poke we make.  Ecosystem Ecologists discovered this the moment they tried to affect habitat ecosystems.  There really is only ONE way to deal with such situations.  They called it "aaptive management."  Stop with this rational, comprehensive planning model stuff.  As the ancients had it, "go with the flow," but with your eyes wide open.
• We must--equally imperatively--dump the idea that "good"and "bad" are discrete, distinct and separate entities.  You simply cannot get one without the other.  We used to know this as yin and yang.

Because precisely half my formative life rests in India, and the other, equally formative, part of past rests in the US, I feel I can point out that India, like many other places, is often and properly referred to as the "land of contradictions."

My entire world evolves around showing growing minds that change is not just a fact, but a precondition, for life.

In that role, and pre-pandemic, I regularly led students in a semester-long, study abroad, immersion experience to south India.  I did this because India, for me, is both exemplary of the morass we now find ourselves in, AND, shows us a safe path out of the quicksand.

So, yes, I would certainly and very strongly assert--though entirely differently than the gentleman from India might have--that India is at least one place where we migh find clues to navigating ourselves away from entire disaster.

   * * *

Oh and about choice editing, I went t what i am certain now is the one best point of entry into any idea or concept we want to know what osme thinking minds have had to say about it--Google Scholar.  There I found, from 2006:

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD: LESSONS IN CHOICE EDITING FOR SUSTAINABILITY
19 CASE STUDIES INTO DRIVERS AND BARRIERS TO MAINSTREAMING MORE SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS

and

I will if you will: Towards sustainable consumption

Cheers,

-- 
     Ashwani
        Vasishth         vasi...@ramapo.edu          (323) 206-1858
                   http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~vasishth
          --------------------------------------------------------
                      Professor of Sustainability
                  Convener, Sustainability Program (BA)
                    Director, Center for Sustainability
                     http://ramapo.edu/sustainability