Our group approached the UAL Net Zero agenda not only as a sustainability policy but as a broader social question: who can actually afford to be sustainable? This question emerged from the different backgrounds within our team. For some of us, environmental responsibility was embedded as a social norm. For others, growing up in contexts with issues such as safety, healthcare, or economic stability dominate public priorities meant that sustainability feels secondary to more immediate concerns.
Afonso Matos’ question Who Can Afford to Be Critical? helped frame this tension. Matos argues that the ability to engage critically in design is shaped by material and social conditions (Matos, 2022). Similarly, sustainability often appears accessible mainly to those who can afford greener technologies.
Our project examined sustainability across different scales. Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten demonstrates how shifting scale reveals relationships between systems that are otherwise difficult to perceive (Eames and Eames, 1977). Anna Tsing’s Feral Atlas further emphasises that ecological realities emerge from complex interactions between human infrastructure and environmental systems (Tsing et al., 2020).
In my speculative scenario, sustainability becomes a publicly funded system rather than an individual lifestyle choice. Redirecting military expenditure toward climate infrastructure would allow governments to make sustainability collectively affordable, reflecting what societies choose to prioritise and fund.
References
Eames, C. and Eames, R. (1977) Powers of Ten. Film. USA: Eames Office.
Matos, A. (2022) Who Can Afford to Be Critical? Eindhoven: Set Margins. Tsing, A. et al. (2020) Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford University Press.