I AM a counter-terrorism consultant turned pro-sustainability lobbyist. Quite a stretch, I agree. In my previous job I advised governments on how to serve corporate interests, often at the expense of the public. In my current position I advise governments to serve the public interest by keeping corporations in check. My previous job allowed me to invest thousands into activities of persuasion for profit based on vague threats to security. Currently, my job is to persuade people to save nature, for which I am armed with thousands of pages of evidence on the need to do so, but with little to no money. I have switched from fear-mongering to fact-mongering.

I have also traded one dilemma for another. Whereas I used to wonder how to reconcile individual freedom with security, I now ponder how to reconcile economic freedom with responsibility. But I have come to see that as long as the people I am trying to persuade don’t grasp the full meaning of these concepts, my message will not come across, will be misunderstood, or even worse, get hijacked for some devious purpose. After all, we live in a world where powerful forces protect their interests through carefully applied semantics.

Being a historian, I can look back to see how others dealt with this dilemma of communicating responsibility. Eight score and six years ago, in 1842, a young politician named Abraham Lincoln delivered an address before the Washington Temperance Society, an association of ‘reformed drunkards’ who, after earlier failures of the movement, were enjoying successes in promoting temperance (moderation) as regards alcohol consumption. In his speech, Lincoln blamed the earlier failures of the temperance movement on the wrong leaders advocating the cause: preachers, lawyers, and hired agents who were self-centered and used a denunciatory tone towards the ‘sinners’. This was unjust, he stated, because several decades earlier drunkenness was “recognized by everybody, used by everybody, and repudiated by nobody.”

A certain respect and a belief in the human potential for change, Lincoln said, had made the movement such a success. “When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted.” According to Lincoln, peer pressure was the best encouragement for a change in lifestyle, for which he used a rather awkward example – a man wearing his wife’s bonnet during the Sunday sermon. The reason no man did this was because it was regarded as strange. And thus, “let us make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the temperance cause as for husbands to wear their wives’ bonnets to church, and instances will be just as rare in the one case as the other.”

In the years that have passed since Lincoln gave the Temperance Address we might have reined in alcoholism in society, but in these 160 years we have also ransacked our planet. We successfully sucked the Earth dry of fossil fluids to fill up the tanks of our cars, managed to pollute most of the space we are supposed to live in, and expanded an economic system based on the exploitation of life – be it plants, animals, or human beings.

On the receiving end, that is, the ‘happy’ end of this system, we stand as affluent consumers in the rich part of the world, ‘drunk’ with all the goods hammered into us: on the radio when we wake up, on the billboards when we drive to work, on the shelves when we go to the supermarket, and, well, all the time when we watch TV. A never-ending party, or so it seems. Advertisements constructed by ethically challenged corporations work havoc on our brains while they empty our wallets. It is a party that is costing us more than we realize. And while a small group of individuals is now recovering from the hang-over, most people are still sleeping it off.

I might be one of the early birds who realizes it is time to wake up, get to work and manage our planetary household. But I too should not preach in a self-centered manner and denunciatory tone. I’m not perfect; in fact, I know all too well that I have sinned. But I have tempered my consumerism; I am a reformed drunkard, as it were. And I now have a mission: to make it as unfashionable to withhold your name from the sustainability cause as for husbands to wear their partners’ bonnets to church. I certainly hope you’ll dig my fashion sense instead.