Peer-Pressure and Sustainable Lifestyles

On Fathers' Day, I wrote about how my Dad inspired my passion for green ways of living. Last week, I asked you how you came to your green lifestyle or aspirations for a green lifestyle. (There are several of us who take turns writing posts; I, Don Duggan-Haas, usually post on Wednesdays). This is the third in this series of posts that deals with where your aspirations for sustainability comes from.

In discussions of why people are the way they are, issues of nature verses nurture are often central. Placing the discussion into that dichotomy almost certainly oversimplifies and arguably marginalizes important issues. I won't go into great depth on that argument, but will note that Judith Rich Harris addresses the issue in her 1998 book, The Nurture Assumption, and will note that the book makes a compelling case that peers matter more in character development than either your genes or what your parents do.

I believe Dad's influence on me was important. I don't know whether it was the genes he gave me or the example he set for me that was more important. Further, I don't know if either his genes or his example were as important as the company I have kept. My peers, including friends and colleagues, have greatly shaped the way I see the world and the way I move in the world. That's almost certainly true for you too. And for your friends.

That's a little frightening when I consider the company I've kept, but on the whole, it's a good thing. My friends, goofy as they are, have made me a better person.

Everyone's an influencer. Everyone's a teacher.

I suspect most people who read this blog regularly live in or near Ithaca. Being in a town with Ithaca's vibe shapes the way you see the world and your place in it. I don't live there now, but I have in the past. (I'm PRI's lone telecommuter and live in Amherst, NY). The communities and network you affiliate with really matter in making you the person you are and in shaping both your activities and theirs.

Your community matters, and so do your friends. Obesity and weight loss have been shown to be socially contagious -- if you have obese friends, you're more likely to become obese. If you have friends who have lost weight, you're more likely to lose weight. Similar effects are seen for smoking.

These things make sense -- having a friend lose weight or quit smoking offers both incentive and someone to share strategies with. And more. Having a friend gain weight or start smoking can show that it's not that big a deal in your peer group.

Does the general idea of social contagion carry over to reducing carbon emissions? I don't know, but it intuitively makes sense to me. The Low Carbon Diet is a community-based approach to reducing carbon emissions. It's based on a weight loss approach that involves calorie counting, but instead of counting calories, you're counting carbon emissions. And you're working in a support group with friends and neighbors.

Thinking about carbon emission reduction as contagious doesn't mean you ought to dump your carbon-intensive friends, though you might think about things that your friends have done that influence what you do.

That probably doesn't involve nagging, just in case you were wondering. Showing them the things you've done to reduce your footprint could be helpful. Maybe asking them to shut off their engine while they're chatting with you in the driveway would be ok too.

The line of thinking might also imply making new friends who can offer support for making the kinds of changes you aspire to. And, it can give you an excuse to get old and new friends together to embark together on a Low Carbon Diet.

Can you identify friends who've made you more sustainable? Can you thank them for the help they've offered? Can you talk with them about next steps to take together?

Next week, I'll share some more thoughts on the Low Carbon Diet.

Using Yourself to Understand the Global

When I first started trying to shrink my carbon footprint (about 20 years ago), I was doing so largely because I felt guilty for the damage I was doing through my daily activities. That’s a pretty good reason, but it’s not the most important one for me anymore.

Of course, there are lots of reasons – that guilt; lower utility, travel, and grocery bills; unclutter your life and your home; get in better shape by walking and biking and more. All these reasons matter a great deal, but, for me, the most important reason to shrink my footprint is to learn, and to learn for action.

Twenty years ago was seven jobs, six houses (the first was a rental), and two apartments ago. I’ve gone from being a single guy renting a tiny house to a married father of two living in a smallish house (with some bigger residences in between). I’ve had jobs with long commutes, with walkable commutes, to the commute I have now where I walk downstairs to my computer. All of my jobs in that stretch of time have required at least a bit of work-related travel, but I’m now doing more than ever.

All of those jobs have been about helping people understanding the world from a scientific perspective. Studying your carbon footprint and how to reduce it can be a great strategy for building understandings of your place in the world.

For more than half of the twenty years I’ve been trying to reduce my footprint, I’ve used calculators like the one from the Global Footprint Network to gain a sense of what my ecological footprint is, or to figure out what my carbon footprint is (which is a slightly different concept) I've used the Nature Conservancy's calculator. If you don't know about carbon or ecological footprints, these links are great places to start. Both give good overviews of the related science, and both allow you to change variables and immediately see how that changes your footprint (although the impact of changing airplane travel wasn't working on the Global Footprint Network when I fiddled with it this afternoon).

During the 20 or so years I’ve been thinking about my lifestyle in terms of a carbon footprint, the size of that footprint has gone up and down. That's not surprising based on the changes in my life over that time. It's disappointing to me that it's not gone down consistently and I hope to redirect the trend in footprint size downward.

But I also know that just changing my footprint isn't really going to reduce climate change very much if that's the end of what I do.

However, is is a logical place to start. A key idea informing my work as an educator is to use the local to understand the global. That's central to place-based learning and place-based learning is, in my opinion essential to effective Earth system science education generally and to developing climate literacy specifically. And what's more local than you?

Reduce your carbon footprint. You probably know many of the basic things that need to be done (and if you don't looking back through previous entries in this blog can get you well on your way). But don't let reducing your footprint be an end in itself. Use the study of the environmental impacts as a gateway to understand broader climate and environmental issues.

It can be depressing to visit the different footprint calculators and see what happens when you reduce everything as much as the software allows. You can't get to zero. You can't get to a footprint small enough to be sustainable if you live in the United States (on these calculators) because governments have big footprints, and you contribute to that whether you like it or not.

So, you can't get to zero or to sustainable by yourself. You need to be a part of something bigger. Getting to sustainable requires collective action. Figure out how to reduce your own footprint as much as possible and help others do the same, then (or at the same time) work to change the larger society.

What ideas do you have to nurture that collective action?