Everybody acts like sustainability is someone else’s job. Sure, they’ll avoid straws or get triple pane windows on their third home, the one in Tuscany that they fly to a couple times a year (I sat next to someone at a dinner recently who was doing so), but actually changing culture? That’s too much to ask of anyone.

Everyone acts like it’s not their job. Whatever their job is, they act like doing that work is all they can do. To do more outside what they get paid for would distract from them doing their job. And what job today doesn’t rely on extraction, pollution, and devices made by coerced labor if not outright slavery?

It was nobody’s job to end slavery either

Say you were transported magically back to 1850 in the United States as a person with white skin. Do you think slavery was wrong? Well, it was legal in many states. Exactly whose job was it to end slavery? What would your profession have been at the time? Whatever it was, would you not have said it wasn’t your job to work on ending slavery?

Nor to oppose Nazism

What if you lived in Germany in 1935 as someone the Nazis considered racially pure? Would you have acted to oppose them? Would you have thought they were wrong but just gone along?

Or maybe it’s everyone’s job

I often quote the peer-reviewed Lancet article that 9 million people a year die these days from breathing polluted air, just one of many ways people suffer from pollution and depletion. We pollute, so we contribute to their suffering. 9 million is the total number of slaves in the US over centuries, it took the Nazis years to kill a fraction of that number of Jews, so pollution and depletion are the far greater cruelty, and we contribute to it.

Maybe it’s everyone’s job to end polluting and depleting.

I consider it my job, my responsibility. How else can I have integrity or find internal peace? How else can I do the most important thing anyone can do on sustainability: to lead others?

That living more sustainably improves my life and culture, contrary to what everyone expects and all the theory says, is secondary to it being consistent with values you and I share: embodied by my phrase Do, Live, Leave, Love.

There’s plenty you can do. Regular readers know the most effective start I know of is my workshops. But there are plenty of ways to live by basic human values and avoid hurting people. Most of all, once you live by your values, you can lead others to help them live by theirs.

• ← 820: Andy Samuel CBE: From worry before the workshop to Fun and Community during and after
• Year 4, Day 1 with my apartment disconnected from the electric grid →