DAY 6: MAKE REALITY SEXY AGAIN
Last night we haven’t slept much – we had to be awake and do the anchor shifts. Since we weren’t in a harbor, we had to take care of our boat not just sailing away from the bay. That was exhausting, but again gave us a time to reflect. After being awake for almost the whole night, we woke up at 6 am and sailed from the bay already at 8.
This time the wind was good to us – almost the whole way from Panormitis to Rhodes we were actually sailing instead of using the engine. When you spend a lot of time discussing the climate change, as we obviously do, you also start wondering how can we do it while spending all this fuel?
Sustainability is something that cannot be avoided when it comes to the main topics of our daily discussions. Unfortunately, sustainable way of living is something that became a privilege. Nowadays it seems like you have to choose to either live sustainably or to have money, and that shouldn’t be the case. Sustainability should not be the matter of class fight, but it should be something that we all can achieve.
In 2015 The UN launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, also known as The Agenda 2030). It is consisted of 17 goals that should be achieved worldwide, of which the last one is the goal for partnership, meaning that we cannot do things on our own, but should work on that together.
Change is obviously something that we need, but our main question is who has the power to change things? SDGs were meant to be something that individuals, governments and private sector should all work on in order to achieve them and our today’s discussion was about the power of private sector to make these changes happen.
The main thing about achieving SDGs is of course money, and who has the money? Of course – private sector. The only thing is how do you make them invest it in social projects? When life is dictated by ideas of capitalism it is a long way making the big ones invest huge amounts of money in projects that do not seem it will earn them more.
Why would a big company spend money on taking a couple of thousand of plastic bottles off an island? Why would you think of where the tap water on an island comes from, until you see a huge boat shipping it to it? You often do not think about those things, until you face them closely, but that is our reality, and reality is not sexy at all.
When discussing big topics such, in this case, sustainability is, it is hard not to get depressed or feel small and useless, however we are not here to sit and cry but to discuss solutions. In times of digitalization, internet and technology are the ways of making things transparent, making people aware, and sharing role models for good ideas. What is more – you can use those tools to bring big money and good ideas together, meaning making the private sector interested in investing money in important social projects, work on sustainability and trying to make reality sexy again.
