Listening to the Music Around Us

10 Aug 2010 – Michael Sadowski

On a steamy July evening, my family and I ventured into Prospect Park to listen to a free performance of the New York Philharmonic. We arrived early, staked out a shady spot, and enjoyed a pre-concert dance performance from our four-year old daughter, Eva. Our area soon filled up, the orchestra started playing, and a hush fell over the crowd. Yet, within five minutes or so, the audience began to treat the music as background accompaniment to their conversations, food preparation, cork popping (ok, we popped a cork too – it was really warm!), phone calls, and gadget checking. The volume of the crowd progressively increased to the point which – by the end of the concert – we could barely hear the orchestra. The crowd only went silent again when the fireworks started – silence which was quickly pierced by “oohs” and “ahs.” One of the world’s preeminent orchestras had just performed, and many around us paid little mind. Yet they sat rapt with glee over a three-minute (and not too impressive) burst of chemicals and light.

For me, this experience made me think about parallel challenges in the sustainability agenda. We have become so distracted and over-stimulated that we cannot experience, comprehend, and appreciate what is taking place to our planet and society. We have unprecedented access to information and gadgets which can be a good thing – for example we can learn more about different cultures and stay better connected to our friends and family. However, this access comes with our growing inability to focus on and comprehend what’s going on around us. So, while it’s nice to let your Facebook friends that you are strolling through the park, did you notice that the flowers are blooming earlier, or that the number of homeless people is increasing?

My concert experience also makes me wonder if we will ever be able to make progress on the sustainability agenda without a major event (or catastrophe) grabbing our attention. Just as the post-concert fireworks woke the audience up, do we need a Cuyahoga River to make us care about clean water or a Katrina to make us pay attention to climate change? Certainly, human beings are evolutionarily hardwired to focus on immediate threats – a trait which is a poor match for many issues within the sustainability agenda which are slow to develop or “invisible” (e.g. climate change, bioaccumulation of toxics in our food supply). Given this human disposition, it’s no surprise that many people frame sustainability issues in catastrophic or doomsday scenarios.

So the challenge for anyone working to effect change in the sustainability arena – consultants, companies, NGOs, policy makers – is to get people to not wait for the fireworks but to listen to the music around them. Only when we truly listen will we be able to comprehend and then act.