sustainability. We have a political party called The El-Marada Party. You can see their billboards now on the major highways. Their logo is green. They are saying “Go Green, Go Marada.” I am not sure how much they are doing for the environment, it’s a political party, politics have messed a lot with the social life of people, and now they are taking advantage of people seeking a green future. Don’t get me wrong, many people are interested in doing positive things, but they are sometimes doing it in the wrong way. The officials in politics should know better than that. So the environment is being used as a political tactic, how do you think people view this perspective of sustainability?
Well, lots of people really don’t understand what sustainability is. So you can say that I am working in sustainability, but they will not know what you are talking about. You will have to explain it to them. Some might be familiar with sustainable development, because this is a term that has been used, or abused, by many people here in the name of implementing some projects. They will understand that you are talking about a sustainable “project,” but no, it’s not a sustainable “development.” Sustainable development is the strategy, the application if you are working with sustainability.
171
The second issue is that when you explain to people the goals of sustainability, they’d say, “forget about it, it’s not really possible to take into consideration the social and environmental concerns in any project that you do.” So if someone is putting up a building, for example, and they have trees planted around their house, they will not hesitate before cutting them down. But, if they knew they were violating some law, then they would simply do construction on the weekends so no one is there to observe, or they will try to bribe the police. Historically, that is the way people have protected their rights. This is the case for a lot of people, especially if you are talking to people that are not involved with social work or people who have not gained education in some institute that cares about these issues. If this is not important to the minds of people, it’s really hard to get them to see the picture from where you see it.