Hasta La Ideas

You will recall David Stairs’ Arguing With Success last September, where he takes to task countless design-for-social-change initiatives (later debated on Change Observer with Valerie Casey). Well, it’s sustainability’s turn, and the piece, with equally sharp teeth, just went up yesterday. Here’s a nice paragraph:

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, the brazen capitalization of our environmental crisis by those working in design circles seems less like the co-opting of a forty-year-old environmentalist philosophy by a business plan than an admission by the profession that it neither sees the future clearly, nor cares much about anything beyond its own economic survival. While profiteering from sustainability by any profession may seem a lame undertaking, substituting our immediate personal prosperity for Our Common Future, it is yet another instance of business-as-usual for what McLuhan called the “frogmen” of sales rhetoric masquerading as social entrepreneurs and science popularizers.

No comments yet, so check back regularly I’d say.

Read the rest of Colonizing Sustainability here.

(more…)