Hope without action is just a comforting illusion
Rosie Baker is Marketing Week’s specialist on sustainability and retail – and the two topics often go hand-in-hand. Her blog focuses on all things to do with sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility and ethical business.
I got an email yesterday from someone I didn’t know with the subject line “The protein Crunch”. All it included was this image telling me that it took 24,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef and 30,000 litres of water to manufacture my mobile phone.
Intriguing and a little confusing but after tapping the name into Google, I came to this page: telling me that the teaser I’d just received was part of a marketing campaign for an upcoming book called The protein Crunch – Civilisation on the brink by Jason Drew and David Lorimer.
So I visited Amazon and found out a bit more about the book. The book claims to reveal “the shocking truth” about how people have abused the planet, degrading the natural resource that produce the food we eat and putting us in the rather dire straights of not being able to produce enough food at the exact time the global population is expanding at its fastest.
The blurb claims that the book offers “conditional hope for the future” because “hope without action is just a comforting illusion”.
There are a lot of brands also struggling with sustainability and how to get the message across and while I don’t disagree with the book’s points, it seems like a threatening way to go about communicating the message that en masse, we need to take better care of the planet by polluting less and conserving more.
Will have to read the book before I can really judge blurb and book jacket alone fill me with a feeling of dread about the plight of planet earth in a “the end is nigh” kind of way, rather than galvanising me into taking action.
