More priority given to care and caring? Collective action for individual good? Cities designed to enable us to be good neighbours? Or inequalities made worse by stark divisions between the people who can work from home and those who can't? She is Still (virtually) Sustainable brought together a brilliant panel to explore what the future of sustainability looks like, from our vantage point within a pandemic and a lockdown.

The headline takeaways for me were:

There are clues about whether system change is happening, in our mental models. For example: trust in scientists; seeing exponential growth in action; seeing massive government intervention to reorientate economies; seeing our interconnectedness demonstrated in real time as the virus spread; experiencing collective action for individual benefit. (These were from Zoe Le Grand, of Forum for the Future.)
The work of 'caring' is being valued, and the poor treatment of carers is visible in stark terms.
We're realising that what we miss is hanging out with and having our friends and family round, rather than the four hour commute or the weekend on the ski slopes. We are perhaps beginning to see that holding on to those things will take political action not just individual choice. (These from Dr Susan Buckingham.)
The lockdown and the pandemic are not levelling experiences, they are polarised and exacerbate inequalities already present in the system. We need to work out who our allies really are, and work with them.
While global processes and institutions are struggling to keep their conversations going without travel, we can get active in our communities to change them to enable us to be good citizens and good neighbours: "redesign and reimagine our phyiscal spaces and relate them to the values that we now find ourselves in." (Farhana Yamin)
It's the biggest opportunity of our lifetimes so far to change eveything! And cut yourself some slack, because we also have the worst anxiety, trauma and imposter syndrome we've ever felt. "Remember, you are a good person doing good things in the world. And every single thing that you do, every single improvement, every single speech you make, every single email you send, every single encouragement you give to another woman, every single local group you support, every single time you are nice to your children... these things are making a difference." (Solitaire Townsend)

There will be more about what came out of these sessions in posts on the She is Sustainable website and She is Still Sustainable page on LinkedIn, so watch out for them.

Making the Path by Walking

This post was first published in the May 2020 edition of Making the Path by Walking. Scroll right down to subscribe.