How we bring out people's will to change

Journalist: Larissa Tschudi | Photographer: Markus Bertschi

Mr Piccard, we are here in Lausanne at the headquarters of your foundation and we’re surrounded by numerous trophies and items with an aviation theme. Flying was an unattainable dream for mankind for a very long time, until it finally came true. How important is it for us humans to have dreams?
It’s essential for people to have dreams. It’s also just as important though to put the conditions in place for the dream to come true. After all, it’s very frustrating to dream and then not fulfil the dream. And what people sometimes don’t understand is that they have to work harder for their dream. They have to create the conditions that make it possible for the dream to become reality. Sometimes it’s fundraising and sometimes it’s skills that you have to learn. It’s also important that it’s your own dream, and not someone else’s.

As an aviation pioneer, you have set an example of how to make your dreams come true. In doing so, you have also encouraged other people to realise their dreams.
It’s a question of how you view life: what is life for? Do you want to learn something new, explore and understand new things, or do you want to hold on to the way things are and not let any dream get in the way of the status quo? I do think there are some people out there who don’t dream. Maybe not dreaming is a way of coping with a difficult situation. Sometimes we have to help these people to reawaken the spark that lies dormant inside them so they can make their dreams come true.

Let’s talk about your vision of a cleaner and more sustainable economy for the future. You have been working on innovative solutions for a long time. Which of these ideas are the most promising?
Whichever ones make life, industry, mobility, agriculture and waste management more efficient. People often don’t understand what efficiency really means. Efficiency is about achieving a better result with less resource consumption. In other words, you can do better with less. The link between economic development and consumption is removed.

You mention the concept of clean or “qualitative growth”, which is something you advocate. How does that work?
You create jobs and develop the economy by replacing what is polluting elements by what protectswith measures that protect the environment. Instead of selling quantity, you sell quality and efficiency. Sometimes you sell fewer products and make less revenue, but if these products are more efficient, more valuable and more durable, you can sell them at a higher price and your profit is higher. For the customer, the price  it becomes cheaper as he doesn’tthey don’t need to buy these products as often. Quality is a business, and it’s also much more profitable when it comes to the bottom line. Until now, we had to choose between a sacrificial and expensive ecology on the one hand and dirty, polluting yet profitable industry on the other. Those days are over. We can have a profitable ecology and clean industry, but these solutions must be implemented consistently everywhere.

People have to change their habits for this to happen. What have you learnt about human nature in this respect through your work as a psychiatrist?
As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, I have noticed that people are resistant to change. I’ve been treating people for 20 years now. They come to me saying there’s a problem in their lives, and I reply “Good, what do you need to change?” People often want others to change and not themselves. That’s human nature. And what do you do in therapy? Exactly the same as we have to do to protect the environment: you have to bring out people’s will to change.

And how do you do this?
By showing people the benefits of change. If the green transition is expensive and requires sacrifice, no one will support it. That means you have to convince people that a new solution is not only exciting, it’s also better for their quality of life and for the economy, and also that it’s profitable and opens up new market opportunities. Once we start focussing on quality, we will automatically stop doing a lot of things like fast fashion, fast food and all the other dirty things that harm the planet and our health and increase social inequality.

As well as individuals who lead by example and demonstrate new solutions, you also need a critical mass of people who are prepared to support the changes.
Something will only work if you can motivate enough people to do it and it becomes the new mainstream. There are leaders out there who are trying to shape a better future, and there are also those who are resisting it. That creates a lot of tension. If you want to be a leader, it’s not good enough just to say that you’re right and everyone else is wrong. You only become a leader when you manage to point out where everyone can do something right or do it better. You have to join forces with others.

Despite all our sympathy for clean growth, don’t we need to live a little more modestly at the same time?
I agree, we need to become more efficient in the sense that we waste less and cope better with consuming less. We already need to become more sensible in terms of what we want and move away from wanting to own more and more stuff. Owning more useless things is not progress.

What do you mean by progress?
Progress is about finding out how we can improve our quality of life. Let’s take self-driving cars as an example. If you really go for it, you need to process so much data that you have to multiply the number of data centres and the energy to run them by a hundred times. All just to have a car that drives itself. Who benefits from that though? We always have to decide whether what we are aiming for is beneficial or not.

Man knows practically no limits in his quest for technological progress. Doesn’t this megalomania – this hubris – frighten you a little?
I can understand that people can be afraid of technology if they see it as something crazy or something that’s got out of control. We mustn’t forget though that it can massively improve our quality of life. Many people don’t realise that 100 years ago in Paris there was no running water and no toilets in people’s houses. People used to throw faeces out of the windows, there were epidemics and diseases – it was terrible. Today, people’s quality of life is much better in a large part of the planet. The key is that technology serves people, and not the other way round.

You have flown around the planet more than once. How does it feel to see the Earth from above?
When you fly with the wind, like we did with the Breitling Orbiter balloon, or when you fly with the sun, like with Solar Impulse, you utilise the forces of nature, which makes you feel that you are a part of it. That’s why I’m looking forward to flying around the world in a hydrogen aeroirplane next – a hydrogen that is completely clean and produced from renewable energies.