Sustainability isn’t achievable without ending resistance to it, two CU professors said March 6. Resistance to density, diversity, affordable housing and alternative energy are just a few examples, they said.
“How do you get people to think 100 years out?” queried Nestor Davidson of the CU School of Law.
“The short answer is leadership,” responded fellow presenter William Shutkin of CU’s Leeds School of Business. “We need bold, hard-edged statements of where we’re going.”
A clear road map and better tools for thinking can help build a sustainability mind set, he said, and overcome objections to, as an example, integrating wind turbines with hilltops that never had them before.
Davidson and Shutkin delivered their remarks during a breakout session of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute’s annual conference.
“The problem is us,” Shutkin said. “We have to be agents of change.”
Davidson took the point further, noting how group discussions on important issues often serve to harden the individual biases people enter the discussion with.
“We have to change how we think,” he said.
“In the decision-making arena we’re bounded by ourselves by our inability to hear others and to imagine a new and different future,” Shutkin said.