By Quinn Volpe
The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style, and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
“If everyone lived like you, we would need three Earths,” a well-known ecological footprint calculator told me after I answered basic questions about my living space and food consumption. Years of limiting my meat consumption, using a reusable water bottle, advocating for climate action, using public transport and going to the first carbon-neutral university in the United States means nothing — if everyone lived like me, we would need three Earths. The Earth we live on can not sustainably hold a population that acts like me.
The reality is that the way most people live is arguably worse for the environment than the average progressive college student living in D.C. When I’m here, I travel solely via walking or public transportation, I don’t own a car, and I don’t eat much meat. There are a multitude of other factors that influence someone’s carbon footprint, but these are the main focuses of assessments like the one I took.
Much of my belief system is built around the fact that our resources as humans are not infinite. In all that we do as individuals, it is of utmost importance that we recognize this to live sustainable lifestyles. This idea is what proponents of reducing carbon footprint may be aiming to convey. However, forcing environmental actions onto individuals distracts from the big corporations, governments, and other major polluters that are the most responsible for climate change and its consequences.
Even with a serious focus on the individual’s role in fighting climate change, collective apathy is an ever-persisting problem, and “most people do not seem to be seriously concerned,” as Thomas Pölzler puts it in his peer-reviewed article Climate Change Inaction and Moral Nihilism.
“We consume as much as we always did, drive as much as we always did, eat as much meat as we always did,” he said.
A study distinguishing between the individualist versus collectivist differences in climate change inaction found that “participants with more individualist orientations were more subject to perceived intractability and more likely to demonstrate climate change inaction than those with more collectivist orientations.”
I don’t plan on stopping my actions to support climate action anytime soon, even though I recognize that individual action alone is not enough. Even in individualized action, it is important to see climate action from a collective point of view to best recognize how action against climate change can be effective. When we feel as if we bear the entire brunt of climate change, we may easily get discouraged about how our actions are helping or hurting the Earth
Culled from TheEagle (theeagleonline.com)
