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Saturday, July 14, 2018

Climate Change, Sustainability, and Community

I’ve been thinking about behavioral change in response to environmental issues for a long time now.  Forty years ago I wrote a freshman college paper entitled, The Need for an Attitudinal Change wherein I characterized consumerism as a disease that society needed to cure for humanity to survive.  Seven years later for my MS thesis, I evaluated the potential for economic incentives to alter patterns of electricity consumption and the resulting power plant air pollution levels.  Soon after that I embarked on a career as an environmental consultant with the naive expectation that we’d clean up the environment while society got its house in order and quit making such a mess.  In the 1990s as editor of the Slippery Rock University newsletter founded by my father, The Alternator, I explored the concept of sustainability and, among other things, advocated for consumers to use their purchasing clout to help redirect social priorities toward sustainable systems.  Several years ago, I devised a “Philosophy of Sustainability” that was posted here (http://hermitorhero.blogspot.com/2012/02/a-philosophy-of-sustainability.html) wherein I identified six behaviors I feel are key to society achieving sustainable lifestyles: harmony with natural processes, reverence and respect for all things, moderation, cooperation, conservation, and taking responsibility.

I feel like my personal choices and actions have been consistent with the principles I’ve espoused for all these years, but that they have not been as impactful as I wish they’d been.  Intellectually, I embrace my Philosophy of Sustainability, but I’m not satisfied that my actions speak as loudly as my words.  My wife and I have taken many steps over the years to lessen our environmental footprint but as it becomes more and more apparent that society’s consumption of fossil fuels and production of plastic junk is far from abating, I’m asking myself how I can do more.

In the fall of 2017 I attended Al Gore’s Climate Reality training with the hope of stimulating not only myself, but other people as well.  While I’m on track to complete the requisite number of leadership activities I committed to perform this year and those actions may have inspired some others to take action, I’m looking to do more.

With that challenge in mind, I helped to create a Green Team at my office of 350 environmental engineers and scientists this year.  With the interest of a core group, the support of office management, and the guidance of an excellent Playbook produced for the Sustainable Pittsburgh Challenge (https://www.spchallenge.org/) we are working through a variety of self-selected goals such as reducing our use of plastic and Styrofoam, more effective paper recycling, and establishing baselines of energy use and transportation choices with accompanying improvement targets.

These are all good things and it’s rewarding to be working with young folks who are enthusiastic about sustainability.  But, at the same time I’m reminded of articles I published in The Alternator decades ago that listed simple things that people can do at home to be more sustainable.  Item 2 from a list published in Volume 8, No. 4 (Summer 1994) was “buy in bulk and take your own shopping bag.”  While some people recognized that single-use plastic bags were unsustainable way back then, it took thirteen years for San Francisco to become the first jurisdiction in California to ban their use.  Then, nine years later in 2016, California became the first state to prohibit stores from providing them to customers.  So, while individually we often know what is better, societally it can take a long time to move the needle on a large scale.  And that’s just one example.  So, as I start my 60th year I’ve been asking myself why it is that I haven’t made more substantial changes in behavior, even if my attitude has been in a sustainable frame of mind for 40 years. 

It’s definitely not a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.”  Media coverage brings wild fires, melting ice caps, and plastic waste into our homes nightly.  I don’t have to live in a coastal area like Miami where routine high tides now flood city streets or in northern California where hotter weather has led to longer fire seasons, to know we have problems.  And even though western Pennsylvania has been largely unscathed by climate change so far, the prevalence of flash flooding has noticeably increased and the deep winter snows of my youth are long gone.

It’s also not a matter of thinking my individual actions (positive or negative) don’t matter.  I realize that the problems are the consequence of many individual decisions and that the solutions will similarly require the collective effort of many individual actions.

And, it’s not that I don’t know what to do (or what not to do)?  The things we can do lessen our environmental impacts have been known about since environmental awareness started. There have been numerous guides published over the last few decades with tips on “how to save the planet.”  But making these choices part of one’s daily lifestyles does take effort and when society makes it easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing (like using plastic straws instead of paper), it takes a conscious effort to avoid being part of the problem.  When we can make sustainability easy, more people will make those choices.  And, when society decides as a whole, like the California’s proposition on one-use bags, the decision about how to do the right thing is made for us.

Fundamentally, I think it’s a matter of insufficient incentives and disincentives.  Besides ethical and moral reasons to do the right thing environmentally, the value proposition isn’t always obvious.  Economists like Susan Meeker-Lowry (Economics as If the Earth Really Mattered, New Society Publishers, 1988); Robert Costanza (Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability, Columbia University Press, 1991); and Hazel Henderson (Building a Win-Win World, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995) have helped us understand the value of protecting the environment, not just the costs.  Fundamentally, if the value proposition is between survival and incurring higher costs, then clearly it’s worth the higher cost to be sustainable.  Fortunately for now, the urgency of survival hasn’t been clear.  At the same time, it often takes a crisis for society to take significant corrective actions.

Recognizing that problems exist and that there are solutions in hand, what prevents me from implementing more positive change in my day-to-day actions?  Bad habits can be hard to change.  It’s human nature to get into patterns that are comfortable and familiar even if they’re self-destructive.  But we can break those patterns by connecting with others who share our convictions.  Working together, we can achieve a critical mass of like-minded voters who can influence the political process.  We can be influenced to make positive changes in behavior by peer pressure.

My family got me a Fitbit® watch for my birthday.  They’ve all been using the devices for some time and have encouraged me to join the “community.”  I’ve resisted since I haven’t needed a community to help me make good choices about my exercise routines and I thought it’d be intrusive.  But now we’re all linked and I can see their daily activity levels and they can see mine.  I guess the idea is that the peer pressure helps encourage us all to do more and stay fit.  I can see some value in that.

Similarly, I can see value in being part of a Sustainability community.  That’s why the Green Team at work was formed and why Sustainable Pittsburgh developed their challenge as a fun way for businesses to work together toward common and mutually beneficial goals.  Through a points system, we’re rewarded for performing individual tasks that have been defined in the Playbook.  While the actual benefits aren’t quantified, the significance of each activity is ranked so that participants can gauge the relative value of each action.

This type of cooperative effort is exactly the type of process I’ve been looking for to feel motivated, energized, and integrated with others to make more meaningful changes in my individual, family, workplace, and community.  Maybe the next step is to develop a “Sustain-Bit” to help us all monitor and track the individual actions we take every day and how those actions really impact or benefit the environment.