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Racism trumps class. Even middle income African Americans are more likely to live in more polluted neighborhoods.
Those with power put the ugly parts of our world out of sight so they stay out of mind…
…because their wealth depends on our ignorance and our apathy.
That is pretty freaking awesome
…but…
Electric vehicles are the right answer to the wrong question.
Jeff Speck
The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging.…
David Owen
Our economy is measured by growth, but it’s a finite planet.
Sarra Tekola
The key is not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world.
Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.
We do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.
Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.
We do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.
The language of sustainability—as commonly practiced—is in the language of affluence.
Low income people, communities of color…own smartphones at a greater rate than the population in general but they lack a banking relationship.
Bill Bynum, CEO of Hope Credit Union
Sustainable is deeply context dependent.
Designer is just a fancy word for
“creators of solutions to problems”.
We must understand cultural contexts of our work and the systems we work in and perpetuate, intentionally or otherwise.
But we’ve been failing at it.
Though it’s not entirely our fault.
Systemic injustice is like technical debt.
When you think about a cop shooting you, it’s an immediate death.…But climate change—with [related] pollution that’s mostly in our backyard—is still killing us. Respiratory diseases, asthma, and various cancers are slower killers, but connecting them to Black Lives Matter is really important.
Sarra Tekola
Sustainability must care for every community.
…not just the communities that can afford it.
We design for the problems we know.
Wherever there is an injustice and wherever people are exploited, the ecosystem as a whole will collapse.
Sarra Tekola
…but this is the work we’ve been doing all along.
The first duty of those with privilege is to listen and to understand the issues of those without.
The second duty is to confront how the tools that power our own privileges shackle us to its structure to perpetuate itself.
The global economy has tied all of us to distant lives. Our simplest decisions as consumers affect the living standard of people in distant nations who are involved in the production of products we use. Our daily lives put pressure on the global environment. It is irresponsible to bury our head in the sand, ignoring the many ways in which we influence, every day, the lives of distant people.
Be diverse in who you are creating for and what you create.
Emily Gorcenski
Malice did not create this world.
Neglect and ignorance did.
It is cognitively easier to blame marginalized groups for their plight than it is to accept that society is
fundamentally unjust.
Sustainability work is social justice work.
…and social justice work hurts.
We can not let our work as technologists working in sustainability become yet another tool of oppression.
Taking care of people is not always profitable.
We need to challenge our definitions of success and progress, and to stop considering our work in solely commercial terms. We need to radically improve our systems of compensation, to be responsible about credit and attribution, and to be generous and fair with reward and remuneration. We need to consider the impact our work has on the planet. We need to consider the impact our work has on civic and academic institutions, on artistic expression, on culture.
Anil Dash