I'm on mission one of Evoke and trying to play my part by responding to one of the "secrets of social innovation." Ethan Zuckerman wrote:
Don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)
I may be misunderstanding what he means, but I would have thought that fighting culture is almost by definition what innovation is. The cultures that enforce female genital mutilation, h***phobia, suppression of women and so on should be fought, as should emergent cultures of mass consumption of disposable items without thinking of the consequences. Culture is the manifestation of society and for planetary survival innovation is not in the form of products it must be in the form of culture.
As developing countries becomes richer the old make-do and re-use culture is replaced with a consumer culture. Long standing sustainable ways are replaced with fashionable unsustainable ones.
One of the most useful innovations might be to make vegetarianism cool for Chinese (veges have massively lower carbon footprints than carnivores) That's what I mean by cultural innovation. Don't need to invent a new kind of oven or stove - just create cultures for what gets cooked on them.
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