How do we get individuals to reduce their energy consumption?
At a community meeting last night, I got a sobering insight into how difficult it can be to change individuals’ environmental behaviour.
How our obsession with stuff is trashing the planet
How is the success of society measured in the west? Predominantly by how much stuff we consume. We are told to spend money to help revitalise the economy. But it’s this consumption that is destroying the planet. The crazy thing is, it’s not even making society happy.
When water runs out
There is one very important non-renewable resource we are depleting which is very rarely alluded to: water. This recognition of the problem is slowly changing; the last James Bond film had as its villain someone trying to control this most precious resource. Critics of the film scoffed that it seemed a strange manifestation of megalomania compared with previous Bond villains, but this displays a lack of appreciation of the impacts of water supply.
Damaging shared environmental resources: the Tragedy of the Commons
The true environmental costs of our industrial way of life are not incorporated in the price we pay for our lifestyle. What is that cost? The depletion of environmental resources we rely on to support that lifestyle, and the degradation of those parts of the environment we use to dispose of our waste (‘sinks’). This was recognised in a famous 1968 essay by the biologist Garrett Hardin called The Tragedy of the Commons: “Property held in common by many people will be destroyed or at least overused until it deteriorates”.