Let’s Watch Our Language
I hate to say this, but sustainability is not going to save us. We aren’t using the right language. What are we trying to “sustain”? Why is that the bar we’ve set? Shouldn’t we be repairing, regenerating and restoring? It is clearly too late to sustain. I have been saying this for years. I know that if I told my family that I had every intention of “sustaining” them, they would look for the nearest exit. Our language is a problem right now.
I was reminded of this while preparing a presentation with my very dear friends Joey Shimoda and David Cordell . I was talking about hitting the 1.5-degree threshold established by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Joey made a very astute observation. First, he said that’s a lot of words, and then he told me he didn’t feel threatened by a 1.5 degree increase in temperature. He didn’t think anyone would understand how that was dangerous. In this country we don’t even use Celsius to measure, we use Fahrenheit. Make the conversion and see if that is any scarier. I did and it did not appear any scarier. So, we were in a conundrum. We needed to scare people, but we didn’t have the props. We needed good old-fashioned blood and gore…carnage. That’s what we, as a species, need in order to react. We need to see the threat coming, like a lion, a tiger, or a bear. See it and we react. Fight or flight. The Savanah Principle. We need to stop thinking we have until the end of the century and start acknowledging that we are in the fight now. Seriously, it’s not climate change anymore, it’s climate destruction.
We don’t need more scientists and engineers to share data. We know the problem. We are using too much oil. We are digging up too much oil. The oil companies are selling too much oil. Can you see the pattern here? We need a movement. We need people to lead us through some tough changes. The oil industry will soon be shifting from an auto-based demand to a plastics-based demand. Be prepared for that. Plastics are petroleum based, and so the oil companies that had the opportunity to become “Energy Companies” a long time ago, will turn to plastic to save the day, and their shareholders. The oil industry has never been healthier, more profitable or more powerful than they are today. There is a saying that I sometimes hear when people are frustrated. “Doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.” No, it’s not. It’s resilience. And that is what we all need right now. If we are not armed with a sharp tipped spear, but rather a blunt instrument, it will require repetitive effort to get thru. We need to be resilient.
We can’t blame the scientists for this. We need better journalism. We need journalists to listen to the science and distill it into a language which we can understand. Telling people that the planet will reach 1.5 degrees won’t do it. Telling them we’ll be in heaps of trouble by 2100 won’t do it. Telling people in New York City that the wildfire smoke by which they were surrounded was caused by catastrophic planet heat could work. Telling people that the air they were currently breathing in New York City, during those Quebec wildfires, will make you very very sick would do it. Telling them to get used to these conditions, that they were now normal climate patterns, might do it. Watching the horrible destruction caused by wildfire in Hawaii will do it. Watching the city of Los Angeles prepare for a hurricane will do it. I was once told that calling this a climate crisis was using “alarmist language”. We need to be alarmists right now. We are in the middle of a global planet meltdown. But in our industry of architecture and interior design and furniture, we aren’t talking about this enough.
For 20 years the building industry has represented 40% of global carbon emissions. 20 years…we haven’t been able to move that needle. Let’s all start to watch our language a little bit. Call a spade a spade…call climate destruction climate destruction. I think that might be a good first step for us. Our industry needs to start reacting with some real, legitimate urgency. Please start by acknowledging that we are witnessing climate destruction, not change. We need to re-build, not sustain.
