Hopeless or Hopeful Idealism?

Tonight I got in a conversation with a friend about the community of sustainability. I feel a bit unable to make a difference about the world. I’ve been thinking lately about how hard it is to change people’s actions. It is easier to get people to agree with an idea but it is hard to change people’s actions. Let’s look at Juniata’s campus wide program of sustainability. I think that most of the people on campus agree with sustainability as an idea. I think you would be hard pressed to find many students who said they were against saving the environment for their children. But when it comes to putting these actions in to place, it’s harder. I know that there are lots of students on campus who drive their cars across campus: drive from East to classes. How can we talk about a community of sustainability when students are willing to get in their car instead of walking five minutes? We can convince people that they in theory should live sustainably, but it is just so easy to drive there are no visible consequences for taking a five minute drive. How do we bring awareness to little behaviors? How do we make it easy for people to live sustainably? Do we need to make actions easy for people to do them? Will people do things because it is the right or best thing to do? I hope that people will do things because it is the right thing. I think that it is important to make all actions seem important. If we could every action important, or seem important, maybe then behavior would change. But it is hard link the small actions of one player with a large concept such as global warming. I think JC is going about it the right way: trying to make it a community effort. I think we need to work on continually showing the importance of every action.