In your first lessons you met the three concepts that run through the whole of ESS: perspectives, systems and sustainability. This lesson is about the first of them.
Environmental disagreements are rarely arguments between people who have the facts and people who do not. Far more often, people looking at exactly the same evidence reach opposite conclusions, because they want different things from the world. Working out why that happens is one of the most useful things you will learn in this course, and it is examined directly.
You are going to do that work using a single company. On 4 November 1976 McDonald's opened its first Swiss restaurant on the rue du Mont-Blanc in Geneva, a few minutes from Cornavin, with eight products on the menu and 25 staff. Around 3,000 people came through the door on the first day. Fifty years later there are 190 restaurants across Switzerland, and almost nobody is neutral about them.
For most of this lesson you will be holding positions that are not your own.
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1.1.1 A perspective is how a particular situation is viewed and understood by an individual. It is based on a mix of personal and collective assumptions, values and beliefs.
Personal perspectives give rise to a wide range of different positions on environmental and social issues.
Perspectives also influence people's choices and actions.
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[20 March 2024]
[6 August 2019]
[12 Jan 2023]
Pionnier du fastfood, McDonald's célèbre 50 ans de présence en Suisse
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1.1.2 Perspectives are informed and justified by sociocultural norms, scientific understandings, laws, religion, economic conditions, local and global events, and lived experience, among other factors.
A perspective is not the same as an argument. Arguments are made to support a personally held perspective or to counter a different one.
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The syllabus gives you the list of things that shape a perspective. Each card below names one factor and shows how it bears on this one company. Notice that almost none of them point in a single direction: the same factor produces opposite positions in two different people.
The unwritten rules a community lives by. Where a long family meal is the norm, a Big Mac eaten standing up reads as a loss. Where speed and low cost are normal, it reads as sensible.
What the evidence currently shows about diet, emissions and land use. Evidence narrows the range of defensible positions. It does not settle which of them matters most.
What is required rather than merely advised. Swiss animal-welfare law is stricter than the EU minimum, so where an animal was reared changes what the word legal is doing.
Halal and kosher requirements, Hindu vegetarianism and Buddhist teaching on harm to animals shape whether the menu is usable at all, and how eating meat is understood.
When budgets are tight, cheap hot food is a lifeline. When they are not, the same meal can look like poor value, or like a business built on low pay.
A restaurant proposed on your street, a nearby farm winning or losing a supply contract, a sponsorship of the local club. Proximity changes how strongly people feel.
Trade disputes, boycotts and anti-globalisation protest have all attached themselves to the golden arches. That is a large part of why this company, rather than another, is the example here.
What has actually happened to you: birthdays there as a child, a first job on an hourly contract, a diagnosis, a month with no money. The strongest factor, and the hardest to argue anyone out of.