Emotional engagement, along with a general paradigm shift, are necessary for people to convert to more sustainable lifestyles because of the personal sacrifices people will have to face. People today say that they care about a cleaner environment, but what will they do to attain it? Will they only buy food that’s in season, or organic food if they can afford it? Will they boycott all companies that slip past environmental and labor regulations by exploiting overseas labor? Will they become part-time activists, slow the growth of their economies? Will they pressure their families and employers to recycle? How much, in short, are they willing to change? How much do they care?
The people who care the most are the activists. They are the researchers, the consciousness-raisers, the ones who bring their own recycling bags to events which they know won’t be providing. They’re emotionally engaged, and make it a point to fight for sustainability in their lives and the lives of others, even if it’s not terribly convenient. They are of critical importance in catalyzing change because they give people an alternative set of behaviors to mimic—make people stop and think, “Why am I following the crowd I’m following, when I could be following this one instead?” Unfortunately, only a minority of people are like this. Most people will cede that they care but excuse themselves from making change a priority of theirs by saying, “I’m too busy”. They’re too busy to care too much; they have emotional engagements elsewhere.
Why, then, do some people care more about sustainability than others? My guess would be that many people don’t see it as their personal problem. They don’t see it as their responsibility to care or do anything, because responsibility has still not been clearly relegated. It’s everybody’s responsibility to care—we all share this planet together. But because it’s such a collective responsibility, people feel comfortable ignoring it completely and focusing only on the personal duties in their immediate lives. They’re not emotionally engaged because they don’t see how the political can also be highly personal; they don’t feel that they can make a significant difference; they do not see the consequences of their inaction. Of course, they might simply not care, or feel safe in assuming that “progress” will eventually set the important things (whatever those are) right again.
This is why we need a shift in the way of thinking, a widespread change in values. As long as people value what is cheap, quick and easy more than they value something of quality and substance—that costs more in the short run but less when the long-run costs of production are accounted for—they will not care enough to change. As long as people think only about what they want to buy next, and not what it takes to make it—they will not care enough to change. As long as people feel that the consequences are minute, distant, and not their fault—they will not care enough to change. Until they feel that it is their personal responsibility, as denizens of this planet, to live on it without compromising the ability of future generations to do so, they will not care enough. It’ll always be one of the last things on their list of problems to tackle—until ignoring the problem becomes so painful that they have to do something about it, until the situation gets so bad that they begin to see things that scare them.
For a country that claims to have great faith in the power of the individual, we don’t seem to have much faith in ourselves. People go about their lives without making even the smallest, easiest eco-friendly changes because they feel that their choices don’t matter. They feel that one person is too small to make a difference. That’s not true. It’s a cognitive distortion, it’s a logical fallacy, it’s wrong. Everybody’s actions make a difference. Humanity is made up of individuals, and the sum of our individual choices, accumulated over time, reveals what we care about and impacts everybody. So how do we empower people to make the positive changes in their own lives that will benefit everybody? How do we make them realize that caring is worth it in the end? How do we make them believe that, by making more sustainable choices, they can impact the world in a good way?
