Mind the Gap: A Different Take on Sustainability

Abstract

It has been said that the really significant divide in politics is not between the left and right but between optimists and pessimists. At the RSA – the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce – I chair many events at which public intellectuals give their various prophesies. On issues of sustainability there certainly is a divide between those who think that technology and human ingenuity will solve tomorrow’s problems just as they did yesterday’s and concerned environmentalists whose conclusions tends to be some version of “We can’t go on like this.”