Sustainability and Mass Culture

by Jay Levin



If we are to make further progress toward a sustainable culture, I believe the following issues must be addressed:

  1. There is no language of sustainability accessible and inspiring to the mass culture.

  2. There is no language because there are no images, stories, or a common face of sustainability created for and available to the mass culture, which would then create the language itself.

  3. There are no duly identified examples of sustainability, even where such instances exist no mass marketed books, comic books, T-shirts, animated films, radio or tv shows that model what sustainability is or isn't.

  4. Sustainability is an elite concept as presently posed.

  5. Can there be a sustainable culture without easily grasped pop-cultural media forms that dissect economic behavior and compare and contrast the sustainable with the nonsustainable?

  6. How can a sustainable elite that rarely dialogues about the issues, and has no political or systems analysis of mass movements be prepared to have a mass impact?

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