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Humankind exhibits a strong desire for tangibility: to make something real so that it becomes part of what we call our common sense. It then becomes familiar and lies beyond our normal conscious thought by being taken-for-granted.

We need this process to navigate our way through the world. We come to see things and relations as familiar and believe ourselves capable of shaping our environments to our will. We define ourselves through our capacity to act and make claims about the sort of people we are in terms of what we have achieved.

We define ourselves through our capacity to act and make claims about the sort of people we are in terms of what we have achieved.

A huge amount rests upon these claims. Chief Executives of large multinational companies move from one organisation to another based upon the value that is attributed to their leadership in terms of shaping the businesses over which they preside. We also elect political leaders because we find their proclamations about the world in which we should live and how they will shape it to be broadly in alignment with our own.

Equally, if we act without good justification, we can be held to account for our actions. Those accounts must be reasonable to others and if they are not, consequences follow: from friends and colleagues expressing displeasure, through to exclusion from groups to a loss of liberty through incarceration. Thus, if we do not manage our lives in acceptable ways, the outcomes are negative.

These issues relate to the content and the consequence of our actions. We can see that the value placed on the content of any actions is dependant upon the power of those who judge them. Further, consequences are assessed according to who the victims are.

When it comes to the environment, who stands as its judge and can it be seen as a victim?

The environment is ‘non-human’ and regarded as natural and we manipulate and control it in our image as if it had infinite resources; it is separated from the sensitivities that we feel towards persons who are significant in our lives; it is removed from the realm of the tangible. To render it tangible we are reliant upon information concerning current trends - for example, greenhouse gas emissions - whilst the victims are often seen as future generations. Current actions are separated from consequences that appear only through the passage of time.

Consequences are spread not just over time, but space. Consumption patterns can have implications for those far removed from the realm of everyday life.

Consequences are spread not just over time, but space. Consumption patterns can have implications for those far removed from the realm of everyday life. Thus, at current trends, by 2017 we will throw away a third more electronic waste than we do now. That is estimated at 64.5 million tonnes, most of which will end up in developing countries (see http://www.step-initiative.org/).

Consequences that stretch over space and time are two ways in which we can anaesthetise ourselves against environmental damage. There are others. Here we find a great deal of work going into tangibility by separating the content of information from the contexts of our lives. Two of these are the economy and technology.

We are constantly told how important the economy is. After all, we need money to live and most of us need to work to live, whilst our elected politicians fight over who is the best administrator of the economy. However, it is a very particular view we are given which is based on a limited idea of supply and demand. It is not contested: we are bombarded on a daily basis through the media that this is a ‘natural’ state of affairs.

The work that goes into naturalising the economy is extensive. Whole groups of officials, in Whitehall and cities, work very hard to make the information we collect on the economy ‘tangible’. Media cover economic trends and politicians argue over who is the best economic caretaker. A discussion of consequences, contradictions, winners and losers and alternatives is deafening in its silence.

The promise of technology runs the same route. It is seen as separate from everyday actions and often heralded as a panacea to contemporary problems. Whilst technology shapes human behaviour, it is shaped by human actions. Technology needs to be sensitive to the contexts in which we live. Once we see this, technology becomes less of a general solution to our problems. Importantly, it also becomes less attractive to large corporations in their permanent search for profit.

What is missing from all of this? To take seriously the contexts in which we live. It is this which makes things tangible and provides the filters through which facts are turned into meaningful thoughts and endeavours. As Platform articles have shown, communities are thinking about the future by being concerned with their resources in the present. Here we find daily struggles that are a cause of celebration of human endeavour, not ridicule and condemnation as so favoured by media reports and documentaries.

When we take context seriously, what happens to officials who preside over the content of information about places? Their practices aimed at tangibility need to be questioned. Yet they too live in places where some things can be taken-for-granted and where resilience may or may not be possible. It is time to join these issues up and not work so hard to keep them separate and so what we measure and what we value need to be brought together.

We can anaesthetise ourselves against the effects of current actions on the environment because we are not faced with the voices from future generations.

We can anaesthetise ourselves against the effects of current actions on the environment because we are not faced with the voices from future generations. Yet if we do not anticipate how our actions, based upon existing and past knowledge, effect the environment, one thing we can be certain of: future generations will not have the luxury of learning from history, but live with the irreversible consequences of current actions. It is time to open up the dominant ways of making things tangible, by bringing in the voices of those who are trying to make a difference in the places in which they live. Here we can learn a great deal and here too, we can find values that are not for the few, but the many.