How to Move from Consumer to Citizen
In partnership with our friends at Swarovski
Published on:
Bright sunlight shining above rocky huge mountain terrain with peaks sticking out of thick clouds, South Greenland
|Chris Zielecki / Stocksy United
“We've turned ourselves just into these consumers,” says David de Rothschild. “We've lost sight of the fact that we're citizens.” De Rothschild, who calls himself an “optimistic pessimist” is a world adventurer and environmental activist. He once set sail across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Sydney, riding on a 60-foot catamaran built from thousands of reclaimed plastic bottles. You might think he’d tell us to give up all our material desires and wants—but he has them, too. And his most profound advice starts here: Be willing to unlearn, to move from fear to curiosity, to remember the magic of nature. It’s possible, he believes, to engineer ourselves out of our mess, to reimagine profit, to reframe companies as communities, and to reclaim our role as citizens of the world.
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