Baby Steps

Part of the process of adopting a more sustainable mindset is reflecting on one’s behaviors and habits and whether or not they are compatible with the lifestyle changes that they are trying to make. More often than not the answer is no, which inevitably leads to a transition state where one is trying to rid themselves of old habits while they try to adopt new ones. It is incontrovertible that the current lifestyle standard of the United States is built upon unsustainable practices: we use gasoline and oil to run much of our transit and production infrastructure, we produce literally mountainous piles of non-recyclable materials that find their way into landfills every year, our factory farming systems contribute significant amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and are the perpetrators of immense amounts of environmental harm every year, it is still widespread practice to implement land transformation practices such as deforestation and land flattening in order to build our homes and communities, etc. These are all questions that get raised when one begins to consider the question of how to live in a sustainable manner.

All of these practices have been established as culturally excepted norms, so the realization of having had a personal contribution to them can be emotionally strenuous and make the transition to a more sustainable lifestyle very challenging. Realizing that you have a problem is always the first step to ameliorating that problem though. It is the first step that for many can be an extensive trek, which is not an unrealistic expectation considering just how extensively entrenched these practices are in society. For the majority of people it is an unrealistic expectation to adopt an entirely new lifestyle cold turkey. Rome was not built in a day, and when your job requires you to drive a car to work, or you buy berries that are sold in plastic packaging so that you can eat healthily, or you buy a modest home on a bulldozed plot because you need a place in which to raise a family; it really is not feasible to expect the majority of people to adopt a new lifestyle in a day either.

In light of these considerations, I think that the most important part of transitioning to a more sustainable lifestyle is to take confidence and positive reinforcement in the small changes: such as making the switch to reusable shopping bags, riding a bicycle around town more, finding blueberries that are sold in more sustainable packaging, etc. Over time these small habitual changes will add up to have a great deal of impact when it comes to improving your life, and the driving force for that impact will be the positive self-reinforcement given from finding confidence in these changes. It will undoubtedly be one of the most effective driving forces that will allow you to roll, crawl, waddle, walk, and then run to a more sustainable future.

-William Hester, Physics ’16