The Action Gap

Every day we are flooded with messages about the world around us. Friends, professors and news media all contribute to our perception of what is going on beyond the bubble in
which we live. A current issue of great national concern is the relationship between humans and the environment, a concept referred to as sustainability.

A buzzword of its day, it’s hard to miss in the headlines of nearly every major newspaper or magazine, or to imagine the plethora of created job opportunities, which we all so dearly covet. But if the idea is defining our generation, we all relate to it differently.

Some students have a sense of duty to their community and build grassroots connections within our campus through bodies like Eco-Reps, the Sustainability Committee, or Students for Renewable Energy and Environmental Protection. Some students have trouble finding ways to get involved in the ‘green’ movement. Some understand that their collective negligence will lead to future consequences. For a great deal of students though, we endorse the goals of President Nirschel’s Climate Commitment in thought, but are naive to those goals in action.

To those students who are caught in this action gap, I ask, how much further deterioration is it going to take before you try to live more economically and environmentally efficient?

Is the rapid growth of developing nations and the delicateness of ecosystem dynamics in our biosphere enough to get us to realize that drastic measures will be taken to alleviate this problem if it is to continue spiraling out of control? Is the industrial tarp that covers our earth going to spew smoke until we begin to suffocate?

Relate the concept of the Boiling Frog Syndrome to that of global warming. BFS says that you can put a frog in lukewarm water, raise the temperature by one degree continuously, observe that the frog is still alive and well, until a threshold temperature is reached and the frog dies. What threshold of temperature or change will the earth have to undergo before we realize we’ve gone too far?

The first step towards avoiding this situation would be to have faith in the decency of human beings in the principles upon which our country was founded. Our citizenry proves capable of rallying together after events like the September 11th attacks, and World War II, where we ate rationed food and joined the armed forces. But hopefully we can rally together now to do something more sustainable, rather than wait for a serious conflict or upheaval. We can start making these by realizing that this situation is a commons dilemma, meaning that we must take from a common pool of goods in moderation or it will disappear if overused.

Next, consider the Golden Rule, an ethical code that has roots in a wide range of world cultures. It states that you should do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you.

Finally, take the psychological phenomena of the 100th Monkey Effect as it relates to how we can make sustainable behaviors the social norm. It states that you train monkeys one at a time to produce a wanted behavior, but as soon as 100 monkeys are all performing this behavior, then additional monkeys will follow suit, without the training.

Have faith in the Golden Rule. Have faith in what psychology has shown. Have faith in the very same science that provides medicinal cures for your ailments and technologies for your life. The smallest decisions make the largest impact.

If you’re not going green, then what are you going?