Psychology of Sustainability
I thought the third lecture was once again a logical progression from the previous lectures. First we learned about the difficulty of defining sustainability. Then we learned different ways to define sustainability, when and how a definition can help, and strategies to use in accomplishing sustainability without actually defining it. So for me, as an engineer, it was really interesting to think about what people think when they hear all these ideas we have been talking about in the first two lectures, and how we all deal with making important changes in our lives. It was a completely different perspective from my usual approach to problem-solving: identify the problem, and simply destroy it with analytical skills and whatever tools are available, including the expertise of team members and computers or technology. But now we have moved from that kind of simple perspective to one where it is just as critical to engage people about the problem as it is to actually acquire the means to solve it. I wrote in my last reflection about my bottom-up approach to sustainability:
I believe that achieving sustainability today is not even as much about attaining new and improved technologies but just about getting people to care and support sustainable policies. When we were separated based on how we thought sustainability would be achieved, I fell into the society-based change from the bottom-up group of the class. I think that people need to get educated about the issues we face, take individual responsibility, and in general make a few sacrifices and make meaningful everyday decisions to take care of the environment.
I was coming to the conclusion that we will achieve sustainability based on individual actions, but I didn’t think about why people would decide to make sustainable actions. The presenters cited really interesting facts highlighting hurdles we must overcome to make changes. For example, only 41% of Americans think their individual actions matter to energy usage. Simple actions like turning off the lights are not worth the effort, but effective actions like joining a carpool are too impractical. It’s not me that is the problem, it’s everyone else. Only the government can make sustainable policies that will make a difference; I am just one person, and I don’t matter. I think these are all very modern problems where all of us individually feel like we are sort of lost and powerless to confront all these great problems facing our society.
But I agreed wholeheartedly with the presenters’ approach to convince people to make changes by organizing games and frameworks around smaller communities. As someone who usually takes the competitive spirit too far, I would have a blast trying to win the game that Kathy described in the lecture, the one she and her company set up for Miron Construction. Incorporating a game like this into the workplace is perfect; you see the people you are playing the game with every day, so there is tangible motivation to play honestly, there is the satisfaction of knowing other people see the awesome things you are accomplishing, and most importantly there is the chance to sit down with other people and realize you are all making real meaningful lifestyle, long term types of changes. In this way I think the game is just a means to an end. It makes it okay to talk about sustainability on a very personal level. I used to tell people to turn the lights off, or I would turn the air conditioning off in our house. And people really didn’t take kindly to that. It’s like I was saying, ‘I am better than you for caring about the environment,’ when really I didn’t want to say that at all. It was just the way things were. I think we can make sustainability the new normal by showing people their actions matter, by educating people about what happens when everyone turns the lights off, and by making it clear how easy and fun to do making some of these changes can be. I thought it was funny how people would turn the water off if you made the action worth 100 points or something, but they would feel dejected if they knew it would only save them a very small amount of money on their water bill each year. If it works, it works!
The main thing I took away from this lecture is that people will care about sustainability when they realize their family and friends around them also care about sustainability. As a society we have trouble acknowledging that our way of life might be a failure. Instead of dealing with reality, we would rather rationalize bad news to make it okay or just ignore it altogether. And we may not have set up policies and systems that truly maximize peoples’ well-being relative to the amount of resources we have. But I am still convinced that people will get really motivated if they would just stop and realize that they matter. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like being told that they are important, and that if they make wise decisions, they can protect not only their own environment and save money and be healthy, but they can also make a real contribution to making the world a great place for a whole new generation of people.