Request Monday (10/01/2012): What to do, what to do....

"I really want to something to be a part of the environmental solution. What's the first step I can take?"

-Sarah from Urbana, IL-

The first step on the journey is perhaps the most straightforward and could be the most difficult...it has to do with our choices and our priorities. When we say that government is not doing enough to protect our natural resources and health, or that business is not doing enough to protect our natural resources and health, we really mean that we are not doing enough to protect our natural resources and health. Entities like government and business merely reflect our priorities, priorities that we display through the choices that we make.

One of the first choices we can make is to actively participate more with people near us. The pie charts below show the average time spent daily on various activities related to our life. The one on the left shows the average American in 1950 and the one on the right, the average American in 2000 (data from the Census Bureau). The most striking change comes not in work or sleep, which stayed relatively constant, but rather in the amount of time we spent interacting with others.

In 1950, the average American spent over three-and-a-half hours a day either socializing and communicating (about 1.85 hours) or volunteering (about 1.85 hours). Flash forward to 2000, and the average American spent just over one-half-of-one hour in those same activities (0.52 and 0.13 respectively). We spend more time in passive activities like watching TV than in the act of working cooperatively with others, or even basic socializing. It comes as no surprise then that our communities have less resilience, and people feel less connected. Robert Putnam explored these concepts in his works Bowling Alone and Better Together. When we socialize less, we have weaker social capital from which to build strong communities.

At the same time, we spend more of our financial capital on products and services that drain resources from our communities. In a similar data set, the Census Bureau tracks the expenditures of the average American. The table below lists the differences between 1950 and the early 2000s. Note the drops in food, personal care services, and clothing....all items normally associated with local retail, and the increases in transportation, housing, and pension/insurance. With fewer, truly local banks, the latter group does not generally consist of entities that would specifically reinvest those expenditures back into the community.

If we want a quality of life that minimizes environmental damage and promotes equity, then we need to return to some of the ideas that made us stronger in the first place. This is not a call for socialism or for isolationism, but more to have the pendulum swing back more toward building communities that supply more of our needs, so that we do not have to rely on energy as much. The less we rely on energy from polluting sources, the stronger we become, and the more we take personal responsibility for our choices.