An interview with Mario Petrucci at the World Conference on Science and Art for Sustainability, September 2025, Belgrade, by Vesna de Vinca, TV author, journalist and producer.
The Unholy Trinity and Sustainability Challenges
Vesna de Vinca: In your work, you identify three core systemic causes of the global inadequacy in responding to the ecological crisis, which you call the Unholy Trinity: bad memes, framed questions, and radical inertia. How do you see the role of these three obstacles in effectively blocking real societal and economic changes, and in what ways can art and poetry directly act to break them?
Mario Petrucci: First, we need to make clear what the three parts of the Unholy Trinity actually represent. A meme is a self-replicating unit of culture, as coined by British evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins. It describes the gene-like behaviour of interlinked cultural fragments; these travel from generation to generation, often mutating as they go. Examples might be a popular melody, a catchy TV advert, or a political slogan. The way in which assumptions and reactions concerning climate change are propagated and maintained, against the tsunami of evidence that demands urgent action, suggests that ‘bad memes’ are a key player.
Next, ‘Framed Questions’ are problems posed as though they invite open discussion, when in fact they have a tightly-constrained agenda lurking in their depths. ‘Are we aiming for 0.1% or 0.2% of GDP to be spent on sustainability?’ is a Framed Question: it offers an immensely limited choice. Framed Questions are to be found throughout economics and politics, partly because many of our inherited assumptions are invisible to us – one example of a critically buried assumption might be that untrammelled economic growth is necessarily an uncontested good.
Finally, and perhaps most important of all: ‘Radical Inertia’. This describes a deep-rooted resistance to change, encountered whenever an established way of doing things, or perceiving situations, holds us in a vice-like grip. This is not simply a rephrasing of the persistence of certain assumptions, ideologies or accepted ideas; it includes such mammoths of intractability as the built environment, technical infrastructure, legal systems, national customs, and so on. It doesn’t take a bucketload of imagination to predict the likely response to any attempt to, say, ban mobile phones or restrict TV. The point here isn’t whether or not such things are ultimately useful or desirable, but whether or not we have lost the genuine freedom to be able to take them or abandon them.
This type of inertia is extremely difficult to overcome, as it infiltrates all aspects of our lives, economies, and the many interwoven, interdependent systems that channel human activity and progress. It is a term I myself coined, furthering and adapting Ivan Illich’s notion of ‘Radical Monopoly’. Of course, any change requires that we overcome some degree of inertia; but Radical Inertia is different; it is ‘radical’ because the implied or attempted change is practically impossible to imagine, to address, pursue or implement within existing systems.
For me, these three aspects of the Unholy Trinity are among the main reasons that our species (post industrial revolution) continues to be largely unable to generate a fully conscious and creative humanity in harmony (or even détente) with ecology. It’s impossible to overestimate the impact and damage of denial and addiction here, those hapless associates of Radical Inertia. Directly and indirectly, the Unholy Trinity contribute powerfully to addiction and denial, and they demote our attempts to respond to climate change, breeding international isolation and re-seeding global inequality.
So, given the scale and extent of these issues, what on earth can art and poetry achieve? At the moment, the environmental ‘debate’ can sometimes seem like a juggernaut rushing towards a cliff, whose occupants are vigorously contesting whether they are doing 105 or 95 miles per hour. I’d be a fool to claim that, somehow, at our current collective and political levels of unconsciousness, addiction and neglect, great art can simply eliminate all resistance to pro-environmental change; it hasn’t been able to do so, so far, perhaps because for most people and institutions it is not a central plank of their day-to-day activity or a major component of their guidance system, in the way that (say) profit or cash-flow is.
To modern humanity, economy is the new ecology. Also, art cannot succeed in isolation; it has to be part of an integrated approach. That’s not to say, though, that art cannot serve as a formidable ally in the struggle. There is a complete book needed to explore this question fully, so all I can do here is to briefly summarise the main routes through which art can help us.
First of all, good art heightens our awareness of the detailed texture of perception. It helps reveal entrenched or habitual thinking, exposing assumptions, making the automatic and familiar strange, through what Russian Formalism termed ‘defamiliarisation’. In this way, true (not consumerist) art can shatter the three legs on which denial and unsustainability squat. Second, art can transform us, and transformation is the one thing that can severely fracture Radical Inertia. As poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: ‘What is your most pressing injunction, if not for transformation?’
We can all bring to mind a poem or painting, a film or sculpture, that revealed our selves to ourselves, that punctured a Framed Question, however obliquely. Third, great art challenges the dominant ideology simply by being what it is, plural and untamed, cracking the veneer of a meme or Framed Question, or splintering some shard of Radical Inertia, with its forensic insights and empowering trajectories through mind and heart.
Fourth, art generally nurtures empathy and sensitivity, both essential to eco-justice. Fifth, real art is meme-proof: it cannot be hemmed in to any one-eyed meaning, that Cyclops view of the herd. It operates on several levels at once, across apparent boundaries. Australian poet Les Murray said: ‘Only poetry recognises and maintains the centrality of absolutely everywhere’. Sixth, art appeals to different parts of the brain than rhetoric and facts. For instance, art can be thought of as a kind of ‘what if?’ that encourages us to re-engender ourselves and our world, to challenge (in a different manner than ‘reason’) those patterns and habits in ourselves we might prefer initially not to look at. Great art, if we let it, deflates denial. Great art reboots consciousness.
Finally, positive poems or artwork could offer an antidote to the harrowing, brutal visions we’re exposed to in more pessimistic scientific predictions and many books and films, where we risk – or will surely lose – just about everything. Research suggests that we respond better to positive messages and encouragement than to fear and doom, and the former can actually foster intervention and involvement rather than the apathy and anxiety of the latter. Prophetic art can therefore serve to emphasise, as much as jeopardy, those eternal values we would hope to preserve, or even augment, in some future world, however compromised.
That way, Eco-poems – and Eco-art more generally – can avoid becoming just another form of Framed Question whose predictions are solely, and paralysingly, bound up in futility, failure and fear. I’m not saying that art is thus a substitute for lobbying or activism, or for practical and political endeavour; but it can help to mobilise and inform new forms of hands-on and ideological change in that webby totality of what society is. Even one poem or artwork in the classroom or in the public domain can re-channel many minds, or create the atomic starting point for an entire constellation of innovative activity. After all, isn’t ‘ecology’ fundamentally about starting points and subsequent Relationship?
The Role of Art in Overcoming Eco-Lethargy
You highlight that eco-lethargy stems from human slowness, denial, and habitual dependence, despite the clear urgency of ecological problems. Which forms of art, in your view, are most effective in raising awareness of urgency, motivating social action, and reversing the inertia of individuals and institutions?
Art can be part of the disease too. It can be blatantly commercial. It can be simply not very good. And remember all that god-awful jingoistic verse of the First World War? So, is my wish-list for helpful art met by the avant-garde? Perhaps, but not necessarily. What I’m really indicating, maybe, is art that possesses a radical but also authentic intent, or that observes so intimately and sensitively that we’re profoundly changed by it, made more fully awake, more completely connected. Any art that does this (whether or not it is also avant-garde) becomes, by association, ‘Eco-art’ – or at least a close cousin to it – because without these critiques, motivations, mobilisations, and re-awakenings in the human spirit we stay trapped individually in ourselves as we are, blown along by the collectively enmeshed systems of unsustainability, oppression, and deadness that most societies have invested so much in for so long. That said, clearly I’d include Aboriginal or Indigenous art as a potential candidate.
Also, any artworks/ practices that address ecology could assist; this is the more common understanding of what is meant by ‘Eco-art’; but the term can also apply, more technically, to art that immerses itself in the environment itself, as a site-specific contributor or integrated presence, a ‘collaboration’ that preserves, remediates, ‘meets’ or vitalises the environment it incorporates and is incorporated by.
You might ask: ‘Are these various manifestations of Eco-art on the rise? Do they work?’ Well, it depends where you look, another huge and complex question I cannot go into here. For now, let me say that art and poetry can contribute something powerful and important to ‘being in an environment’, perhaps a seed-crystal for a much greater identification with it: ‘Being of the environment’. Meanwhile, a suggestion. When you come across a poem or artwork, ask yourself: ‘Is this part of the problem, or is it party to healing?’ And that question is not just to do with content or what the art seems to be about, on its surface. It’s about You gently but firmly interrogating, and growing, inside yourself, the taproots of perception.
Redefining Sustainability through Art
You question the very concept of sustainability, suggesting that it too is often caught in the trap of the Unholy Trinity. How can art and poetry contribute to a genuine understanding and redefinition of sustainability, so that it ceases to be a mere phrase and becomes a practical guide for transforming society, ecology, and global policy?
I’m not sure that sustainability is merely to be ‘redefined’ or made ‘more practical’. I’m not convinced that leads us to a sufficient solution. Certainly, the term ‘sustainability’ is in need of an overhaul: too often it is ill-defined; since (perhaps partly because of) Brundtland, it has become vague or co-opted, or a universally interpretable statement of generalised goodwill. Attempting to address it meaningfully can sometimes feel like shooting arrows at a multiple moving target. I’m not ignoring all of that; what I prefer to stress, here, is how emphatic the Unholy Trinity is in telling us that our ongoing crisis really begins with assumptions, habits, motivations, perceptions, communication. What we actually do, and the systems we construct to do it, are almost certainly forced to follow suit. That is to say, the idea of sustainability itself, what we each individually understand it to be and how we each attempt to apprehend and visualise it, is what aggregates by various routes into our collective response to the eco-crisis. A lack of genuine insight and vision expressed individually therefore leaves you, collectively, with a vague and nebulous cypher.
For existing vested interests, that uninspected ubiquitous cypher is far more manipulable than a series of individually held, vitally precise, inter-negotiating visions. Unless we constantly interrogate and challenge our own particular imaginings of what sustainability means, or what it might evolve into, if we fail to individually grasp what collectively we mean by it, our societies are most likely to simply repeat existing mistakes in new ways, perhaps even compounding and exacerbating them. In this sense, art can provide an invaluable tool in reassessing what sustainability incarnates as, beyond our academic arguments and papers, what assumptions lie behind and beneath it that we first have to set right.
Going even further, it may be that we need to spend less time talking about (or from) this fuzzy place of ‘sustainability’ and more time engaging with the actual, sharp environment, the precise and in-focus environment, the real and dirty and silty environment, the slugs as well as the dolphins, the mould as well as the mountains, the sewage as well as AI, immersing ourselves in it, listening to it, seeing ourselves as fellow travellers in ecology rather than managers and overseers, not being merely cerebral and cognitive but also visceral and instinctual. The environment is the greatest survivor, the complete teacher. Whether through arts or any other means, we must re-learn how to learn from her, as Indigenous peoples did.
It may be that ecology herself is the only teacher who can truly convince us that observation / attention is a far deeper process than scientific measurement alone; that valuation is only fractionally interpreted via a price; that understanding sometimes needs, but always goes way beyond, data and statistics; that human response may require, but can also be so much more creative than, a policy or law. Indeed, I suspect that humanity will only overcome the vast Radical Inertia of its unsustainable systems by creating, then surrendering to, approaches that themselves imitate how ecology operates. Perhaps this is what unsustainable institutions and cultures most need, at least initially: to embrace sustainable practices that are functional and negotiated, yes; but also to become capable of awarenesses and activities that have the quality of great art, that are open and sometimes mysterious, that are creatively, intelligently exploratory. How else can climate change be tackled inclusively?
One of the beauties of great art is that you can never be sure where it will take you. There is a great deal more I could say about the practical and aesthetic contributions art could make, and does make, to the ecological discussion currently underway; I believe, however, that the primary point is this: for all the urgency of our situation, we must find time – and, more crucially, clear space – as individuals and in our various groups, to engage with art, with ecology herself, and ultimately, within ourselves, to develop a meaningful receptivity to other-centred possibilities and the one-ness they engender. That is the ocean floor of Radical Inertia, where the deepest wrecks of resistance lie. Ultimately, sustainability is not an academic issue. How this receptivity, this consciousness, propagates through our systems and power structures is probably not entirely in our control, and it may even be that many of our existing systems simply cannot accommodate it.
The first step, however, must be engagement; to realise the full, enriching diversity of each individual selfhood, the profound courage and humble drive that we each need in addressing corporate ‘reality’, and the miracles that an involved Self is capable of. To extend our ‘best moments’ into a way of life: that is one thing, for sure, that great art can inspire us to at least desire.
More information on Mario Petrucci: Website / Wikipedia
