World Student Community for Sustainable Development

by Laurent Demarta

With the help of amazing coincidences, I had the good fortune to take part in August’s Youth Encounter on Sustainability (YES) in Braunwald (Gl), Switzerland. It was not my first time taking part in a youth meeting about our planet, but this one will remain as a special one for many reasons.

The other conventions Iâ€^TMve been in were shorter, and involved more participants. This means that the relations we developed were shallower. In Braunwald, we were only a group of thirty-four who lived together, for fifteen full days: rooms, leisure, and various forms of group work allowed us to learn a lot from each other. I believe at least a dozen of the persons met there can become real friends (but this, only time will show), and I think Iâ€^TMll keep in touch with most of the others… This YES convention was socially a complete success.

But the best benefit I found in Braunwald this summer was the meeting of people with whom to share our point of view about sustainable development. Most people are blinded with the related technology, whereas here, the work was focused on its social aspect.

I have little care for electric cars or new blinds that adapt automatically to sunlight. I firmly believe nothing of this will change the principles that drive our world. All to the contrary, low-consumption cars are the most treacherous sirens to keep us from changing our lives in depth.

The consumption-mode we live in is not a cause, but a consequence. The excesses of all kind we live in nowadays are not due to inappropriate technology, but to inadequate demands to technology. Whatever we ask for, technology will provide it: technique is a tool, an answer. The problem is “What was the question?”

If we want the world to change, if we want our children to grow and live on a friendlier planet, we have to propose new values. Techniques will follow.

Usually, on this level, sustainable development is far from convincing. We’ve seen in Braunwald an interesting picture of a quiet, worriless, peaceful, good-thinking balanced life. Switzerland, my home country, is too bourgeois for me. But I am too passionate, too “Nietzscheen” to be tempted by such a life. I need more movement, more fireworks, more life! Sustainable development will only convince me when it will profess a livelier lifestyle, more passion, and more lust. Why should ecology be so quiet?

There is indeed no correlation between consumption and happiness! On the contrary, the more I learn enjoyment, the less I need stimulation, or consumption. That means that teaching pleasure is the best way to a more sustainable lifestyle. “Enjoyment” is the key.

It is not bad to teach your children to turn off the light, but it is far more crucial to show them to watch, to feel, to desire, to run, to love life, to pay attention. “Sustainable development” begins with love.