The Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say!

Week Two - “Human Wellbeing and Sustainability”
Comment / Comentario / Commentaire

David Taylor, author of Ginseng, the Divine Root, USA

Moderating team: David Taylor builds on comments from Nakul Chettri this week and the importance of communication highlighted in week one. He uses medicinal plants as an example to show how choosing appropriate stories can help our communication convey the tension between fear and hope.

David Taylor hace eco del comentario de Nakul Chettri y de la importancia de la comunicación como un elemento clave para la sostenibilidad. Utiliza el caso de las plantas medicinales como un ejemplo para demostrar como la comunicación de historias exitosas de conservación puede ilustrar la tensión entre el miedo y la esperanza.

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This week's discussion introduced by Dr. Khosla is very important. How do we describe the good life and its relationship to the environment? How do we pose its relationship with social equity? My comments take up from ICIMOD's Nakul Chettri and link to last week's discussion on how to communicate about these issues. As noted then, it's important to engage the public in a discourse that conveys the subject's tension between fear and hope.

A resonant line in the background IUCN report reads: "Popular support for the complex and difficult transitions ahead demand popular support. This will only be realised if ideas connect with heart and emotion."

People respond to specific stories and care about issues most deeply through specifics. Examples that show linkages between the environment and people can surprise the public, the first step in engaging the heart to apply political will. The point is to select the best example and frame the issue in a way that it can be grappled with.

Nakul Chettri frames a tension between greed and need, or stewardship, and he rightly notes that we must "look at the micro as well as the macro level."

To explore the issue of human well-being and natural resources, we might choose longstanding examples where the two are directly linked. Medicinal plants, for example, offer benefits to human health; and in that case it's clear how maintaining the natural resource helps both people and plants. Still, we find traditional harvesters using stewardship to maintain the resource, and unscrupulous harvesters taking all they can grab. To present the issue, you might choose a story about a few traditional harvesters who have made subtle innovations in response to the threat. This selection of these innovators as characters can 1) highlight the traditional knowledge of their background, 2) highlight the crisis that makes them look for solutions, and 3) convey the hope that they have invested in finding a solution.

In the case of one famous medicinal plant, traditional harvesters of ginseng have made innovations to conserve wild ginseng habitat with an awareness of how to leverage the market demand for wild ginseng. Stories about this kind of innovator can bring a broad audience to the ideas of conservation and economics, with the tension of hope and fear inherent in these issues.

On the links between environmental health and human security, two articles in Environmental Health Perspectives (www.ehponline.org/docs/2004/112-3/focus-abs.html, www.ehponline.org/docs/2004/112-17/focus-abs.html) give a useful overview with key examples.

Since political will is often the missing factor, knowledge of communications research and audience response is not just helpful, it's essential.