Have you ever left the light on or ran the AC at its highest setting in your dorm room and reasoned that it was fine because you weren’t paying the energy bill, the University of Connecticut is? If so, you’re not alone. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone subscribe to that thought process. Yet, this mindset is a bit incomplete. I would venture to ask in return: aren’t we all, as people who inhabit the same planet, going to end up paying sooner or later for our collective action? Nothing is without a cost; indeed, we may not be shareholders injured by unnecessary spending, but we are all stakeholders in our common future.
By now, we all (hopefully) know all about the fast-encroaching dangers of climate change, and how nearly everything we do contributes in some way. Admittedly, it’s a difficult reality to live with, and more often than not we try to ignore it and just live our lives as we please. It’s normal to feel the urge to do so, to feel powerless and desensitized and to wonder if anything you do makes a difference. But what is not normal and what should not be normalized is stopping there. Despite the helplessness we have come to feel surrounding the climate crisis, there is truly so much that we can do — or, perhaps, not do — to flip the script.
It’s all about your mindset. You don’t have to see the glass half empty and draining fast; you can choose to see, instead, that in every choice you make, there is the potential to do better and work toward a truly green future.
Maybe you buy things secondhand, like a microwave or an iPad, to reduce the environmental toll of mining and e-waste. That means you’re guarding against both deforestation and habitat loss as well as the pollution of air, land and water with heavy metals like lead and mercury. Or maybe you make sure to only take what you’ll eat at the dining hall, because food waste is a large contributor to climate change. Then, you’ll be pleased to know that you’re preventing the unnecessary release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere and avoiding further deforestation and pollution associated with agriculture.
But whatever it is that you’re capable of, it has to be something. It’s not a new argument — but one that is always relevant — that we will get somewhere if, and only if, we all take purposeful steps in the right direction. And you’ll find that if you think just a little about the environmental impact of your actions before you make them, you’ll see a myriad of ways to reduce it. And truthfully, it doesn’t really matter whether everyone follows you exactly or not. None of us are going to make the exact same choices, since none of us have the same abilities nor limitations. For example, despite the countless significant enviromental benefits of switching to a plant-based diet, it’s not always affordable, or even possible. If anything, though, this is only more reason to do what you can, since not everyone is privileged with the opportunity to do so. It all comes down to finding pride in the choices you make and in the fight you fight.
And you are not alone in that fight. Humanity is a machine of many parts: the more people that change their habits, the more our output will be altered. When you do good, so too will others around you, because it’s inspiring and contagious. This is truly the far-reaching, paradigm-shifting power of your actions: their impact on the actions of everyone else. Clearly, one person filling a reusable water bottle won’t save the Earth, but shifting attitudes that delegitimize and drastically reduce single-use plastics will get us pretty far. And the solar panels on top of Science One won’t curb global carbon emissions, but establishing renewable energy as the standard for new developments could.
The moral is simply that our actions are much bigger than we are, and we have so much more power than we give ourselves credit for. If and when we finally use it, just imagine what we’ll accomplish.