forget the fad.

The trouble with hyped up "fad" diets lies primarily in their incapability of producing lasting results. However, they never tell you this when you sign up. People usually succumb to these highly unfortunate fads in similar ways: they know they need to loose a few and the tanned ultra skinny lady on the infomercial is very convincing so they say what the hell and take the plunge. Before they know it they’re eating cheeseburgers without buns and chocolate cake that tastes more like flavored cardboard.

After a couple weeks of this they decide life without real chocolate cake is not a life worth living. They flush their diet pills and devour an entire cake. One week later they’re 30lbs heavier than they were when they started.

In our hip to be green society living an “environmentally conscious lifestyle” is the new fad diet.

Everyone tries it for a day or two… we flush every second time and take quick showers, we ride our bikes to work, we eat local and we only use our cell phones for “emergencies”. It usually starts off really well… we boast about our good behavior and scoff at our colleagues who have the audacity to drive to work.

Then one day we need those extra 20 minutes in the shower, our outfit doesn’t translate well when straddling a bicycle seat, our time becomes too precious to worry about where our food came from and we can’t resist the urge to text our 15 closest friends when Lindsay Lohan finally admits she’s a lesbian. One day turns into many more similarly “bad” days and all of a sudden we’ve blown through 30 tons of gas, 30 lbs of garbage and at least 30 baths. And we don’t even want to think about the amounts of time we’ve flushed the toilet.

Like all fad diet’s going without only lasts so long and ultimately fails to yield any lasting results. Yes we have outgrown our skinny jeans and depleted our fossil fuels. Shit happens. It’s what you do with it that matters.

If you have a pre-disposition to be a bit pudgy but you reallllly enjoy your cake, you bake yourself something that’s low-calorie and then you hit the gym. You work through your self-esteem issues and you find out what’s making you over eat. You find a way to balance your cravings with your waistline.

We need to start employing that same logic when developing strategies to rescue the earth from ourselves. Human beings don’t like change. Especially if that change deprives us of something we love. Some people (most people) really love their cars, their houses and their baths. So to limit the amount of time people can spend engaging with the things they love is not only kind of mean, but highly unpractical.

Instead of focusing our time and energy on taking the prescribed route we need to think outside of what we know. We need to find ways to sustain the same quality of life we currently enjoy whilst simultaneously not taking anything away from the environment. We need to think forward instead of backwards.

Two of my favorite forward thinkers go by the name of Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushnerand run a design firm called HWKN. Here’s a ten-minute clip of their vision for the future.