Sustainability is boring! (or: why Wayne Visser is right)
Some days ago, I tried a Google Trends search of the term “sustainability” and I was surprised by the regular oscillations you can see in the search frequency.
It doesn’t take much head scratching to understand the reasons for this behavior. When it is vacation time (summer or Christmas) people get into a festive mood and lose their interest in things they evidently find boring; probably dedicating themselves to more active pursuits.
I kept checking, and I found similar oscillations for other terms, both related and unrelated tot he environment. Try “Shakespeare”, for instance, and you’ll see seasonal oscillations; just as you see them for “environment”. Try instead “sex” and you won’t see anything like that.
Probably, these oscillations could provide a way to measure how boring people find a certain concept but I think this is enough to conclude that most people find the idea of sustainability boring. That explains a lot of things, I believe.
The reason why I made this search on Google Trends is that Wayne Visser was so kind to send me a review copy of his latest book “Sustainable Frontiers“, which I read through during a long wait at the airport of Munich (one good thing about airports is that while waiting hours and hours for your plane to arrive, you can do things you wouldn’t even dream to be able to do in your office!)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
