NATE Hagens' epiphany was powered by Intel. Well, strictly, by Intel shares. In the 1990s Hagens was a vice president at Lehman Brothers earning a hefty $500,000 doing stock trades for some of the richest people on the planet. He spent nearly all of it, but can thank a recurring quirk of those billionaires for his Damascene moment.
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"I would field calls from clients and they were whispering because they didn't want their wives to hear them calling for stock quotes while they were in the delivery room. Their son or daughter was being born but they wanted to see where Intel stock was," says Hagens.
Still in his 20s, Hagens did a volte-face on Wall Street, signed up for a PhD in natural resources and now earns a more modest $50,000 consulting and teaching systems ecology as an adjunct associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Hagens' feat is all the more remarkable because it overcame a stumbling block that vexes sustainability experts across the globe.
The UN Environment Program estimates it will take three Earths to service our current consumption patterns should the world population reach the expected 9.6 billion in 2050. Yet there is, as one expert puts it, "a huge gap between the available knowledge about sustainable consumption and real action towards it, at all levels of society".
The gap is a major challenge for the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which calls on developing countries to take the lead to "protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production".
The message to rein in consumption is clear, yet why do so many people seem impervious to it? At least part of the problem may be in our wiring.
Hagens explains that psychological drives to over consumption start in our evolutionary past. Tribes that amassed surplus resources, such as food, and appreciated novel objects in their vicinity, such as predators, did better. We're primed to be acquisitive and like new things.
Samuel Alexander is a research fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne and a co-founder of the Simplicity Institute, which champions an anti-materialist tradition.
"I'm not convinced that human beings are always going to be rationally persuaded by new evidence that consumerism isn't satisfying, although some will. Often I've personally changed my views when I've seen real world lived examples. It is a more powerful mode of persuasion to actually see it rather than be told about it," Alexander says.
With volunteers he has created Wurruk'an, an eco-village in a heavily treed acreage in Gippsland where a first group of residents has just lived out a year of "radical simplicity": building tiny houses from recycled materials, permaculture-grown zucchinis, a composting toilet, solar cooking and a retrofitted farm shed that serves as a communal kitchen using local produce.
Alexander co-directed A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity, a film that documents the experiment, which saw each resident's spend reduced to less than $100 a week.
Another psychological force might also explain the restraint seen at Wurruk'an. The iron grip that peers have on our psyche was borne out by Monash University researchers who found that disagreeing with others activates brain areas associated with cognitive dissonance and mental stress.
The take-home lesson? It's a lot easier being green when your peer group is the same colour. Hagens prescription to making it work is a blunt one: "Choose your in-group wisely ... the biggest thing I've done is changed who my tribe was and chosen who I want to go through the future with."
But if you can't make sustainable choices, someone else might design them for you.
"Nudging" exploits psychological biases to subtly engineer people's decisions. Norwegian outfit GreeNudge leveraged our tendency to finish whatever is on our plates to reduce a hotel chain's food waste by 20 per cent. They just gave diners smaller plates.
In 2014 David Halpern from the UK government's "Ministry of Nudges" teamed up with VicHealth to paint artwork on the steps at Southern Cross Station. Stair traffic went up 140 per cent.
Liam Smith, director of BehaviourWorks at the Monash Sustainability Institute, thinks nudges could reinforce a greener identity. He cites a Scandinavian case where public transport users were thanked for helping the environment. "Most people don't catch public transport for environmental reasons but for convenience, or speed. But if I was to be congratulated [for helping the environment] I create this new sense of who I am which predisposes me to act consistently with that new identity in the future."
