BLOG: Cultural > Technological + Cognitive + Behavioural

"The most powerful cultural interventions don’t just say “care”—they show what caring looks like in daily life. In my experience, people long to act when action is framed as caring and belonging, not obligation. Popular culture can create that belonging at scale. It can tell us: you are not alone, you are part of a global chorus, and your voice matters. When culture shifts, politics and markets follow." - Christiana Figueres

Environmentalists usually take one of three main approaches: Cognitive, Behavioural, or Technological. All three approaches are valid, but not sufficient, not even when done in combination. Why? Because they do little to get to the roots of the big global problems we face, which are cultural. We live in a hyper-individualistic culture. It has been deliberately fostered by many many actors as the Neoliberal project has rolled on and on. Unless this culture changes we face living in never ending and worsening polycrisis.

OK, shut up doomer.

To get through and out the other side of the polycrisis, we may need to look to culture and adopt cultural approaches to environmentalism. This approach is starting to emerge, I argued that it is part of a wider 'Movement for Interdependence' in my TEDx talk, it is the antidote to hyper-individualism.

What Christiana Figueres hints at in the above quote is that popular culture has a role to play in this, it can help to bring about the sort of cultural shifts that are needed - and there are plenty of examples of filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists, who are trying.

Elsewhere in the same interview Figueres also hints at something much more fundamental that also needs to happen - inner work - and this is where Transformative Sustainability Education comes in, so to paraphrase Christiana... "The most powerful EDUCATIONAL interventions don’t just say “care”—they show what caring looks like in daily life."

I'd go a bit further too, educational interventions that enable learners to experience what it feels like to actively care for something, someone, is the really powerful stuff. It has genuine transformative potential; it can change us in fundamental ways, it can change how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we think about what the 'good life' is.

And this is what Good Life Schools is attempting to do.