Bruce Mau talking about Sustainability

Talking here about sustainability I found this to be gold:

Q: What is the biggest hurdle between us and an oil free world?


A: I think it is actually human behaviour. if you think about it, we already have enough. e.o. wilson a life scientist once said that we could already get to a one world sustainable practice with what we already have. so we don’t need to invent new things, if we just change the way we behave. but we have a mountain of proof that we are not going to change out of an altruistic moto. in other words, even if we 
understand we should do certain things we don’t. this is true even of people like me who are committed to this way of thinking.

I was recently having dining with a few friends who are prominent environmentalists and we were all talking about the things we were working on. I brought up what e.o. wilson said, that if the whole world lived like americans, we would need four additional planet earths, but if the whole world lived like the people sitting at this table we would need thirty five plant earths. so even people who are committed to sustainability aren’t going to change. if you watch al gore’s movie, an inconvenient truth, almost all the photographs of him are in a plane. so we see that the behaviour is not going to automatically change, we have to design the change. we have to design new ways of doing things that are more compelling that the old.