In the past few days I have been involved in two starkly different but strangely related events.  The Unilever and Guardian Sustainable Business’ Sustainable Living Debate: Mainstream or pipedream? And Sony and Forum for the Future’s Futurescapes workshop. I found both events to be inspiring and yet limiting at the same time.  To bring optimism and despair.

The Unilever event looked at the question of how in relation to changing consumer behaviour.  Can and will consumers change their behaviour?  How can businesses and brands enable and encourage them to do so?  Of course the one overriding imperative here is that we as society and business as the creators and wealth and profit are finally beginning to wake up to the reality of a severely resourced constrained world.  Though like any addict; we’ve taken the first step of finally admitting we have a habit but are yet to kick that habit.  And if we understand that imperative I’m not sure we have yet grasped the second imperative.  That we are now talking about the need for radical and sustained action in years and not decades.

I thought I’d return to the subject of working from home.  A recent survey from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) may have surprised many when it revealed that the vast majority of us commuted for less than half an hour a day.  But it also hid some other interesting facts.  Firstly that most of our commuting is by car, about 70 per cent.  And that those that commuted further tended to be paid more.  I would imagine that a lot of this was because of people commuting in and out of London and people on bigger salaries have more choice as to where they live.  As someone who doesn’t have to commute every day I tend to look on the prospect of having to fight to get on a train (and for me the privilege of paying of £40 to be crammed uncomfortably into a carriage to stand with my nose in someone’s armpit for the 30 minute trip into London) or sit for hours in a traffic jam, to be utterly horrific. 

Last week was Green Office Week.  Did you notice?  A part from a couple of mentions on twitter me neither.  I think we can safely say that as a campaign to get us all thinking about our working lives in the office and the impact we are having on the environment it didn’t really break through.  Considering so many of us spend so much time in the office; lights on, air conditioning at full pelt while the heating remains turned up, computers, printers and photocopies left on all night – you know the story, it is a shame this week didn’t get more attention.  Then again in the week when the big environmental news in the UK was “will he or won’t he” about David Cameron and the recommendations of the Committee on Climate Change’s 4^th budget it was always going to have to shout loud for attention.