As true solution to the crisis of sustainability must rely on practical, social engagement as much as with the creation of an effective intellectual treatment of sustainability, intellectual entertainment could provide an effective means to facilitate commitment-to-action at the public sphere. A series of ‘book projects’ are, in this connection, currently in progress, where, first, a set of unobvious facts are selected, followed by a story-making on the basis of these facts only, where readers can keep asking “why”, and keep following these stories until they absorb a deep sense of meaning/purpose. Be it in Manibot’s (2017) wisdom that a new story needs to replace an old one in order for change to take place, or in their roles with respect to the provision of antidotes to negativity that is spread across the media (Pinker 2018), or to provide hope both with respect to peoples’ dislike to feeling incompetent (Robertson 2018), and the pursuit of sustainability not referring to something “so broad as to be meaningless” (Franklin and Blyton 2011, p.5); communication holds enormous potential for attaining collective progress in pursuit of sustainability. Intellectually intriguing and entertaining contents need to be communicated to mass readership in order to engage broader society undertaking actions in favor of sustainability.

References

Franklin, A. and P. Blyton. (2011). Sustainability Research: An Introduction. Pages 3-16 in A. Franklin and P. Blyton, editors. Researching sustainability: a guide to social science methods, practice and engagement. Routledge.

Monibot, G. (2017). ‘How do we get out of this mess?’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/09/george-monbiot-how-de-we-get-out-of-this-mess

Pinker, S. (2018). ‘The media exaggerates negative news. This distortion has consequences.’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/17/steven-pinker-media-negative-news

Robertson, M. (2018). Communicating Sustainability. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315659015