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.
