I think the best way to start this post, and this blog along with it, is to confess to you: I have spent a large portion of my life thinking environmentalism is for hippies and requires huge inconvenient efforts which won't make a big difference in the grand scheme of things. Now before you close this window right now and forget about this altogether (I'm sorry! thus the confession), give me a few sentences to explain myself.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care and wanted to cause harm, but I, like many people, blamed politics and city-planning. (Since I drove 20km one-way to school every day and lived in the suburbs.) When it came to making changes, I was up for hearing suggestions, but it seemed I never found myself in the right environment to hear any, because like me, most of my friends probably felt much the same: scared, frustrated and generally, very helpless.
Since then, a few things have changed:
I had to take a course called Social Context of Business (as part of my B.Comm degree.) 50% of the course included a participation grade based on reading reflections. These reflections did not have a specific question to answer but I often enjoyed contradicting what I’d read. I can honestly say that that course has opened up my eyes to so many different perspectives and ways of seeing business, life and people. I spent the 4 months of that semester quite stressed and going through countless crisis based on how doomed I felt the planet was. All in all, it was tough, but I would take that course again today if I could!
The second event was the reading of a book called No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. You can find out more about it here, but the idea is that your average Joe living in NYC with his family decides to live for a year without causing any harm to the planet… just to see if it’s possible, and in turn, inspire people to make changes in their own lives.
Now I’m not asking you to have an existential crisis or to lose sleep over the environment (if you haven’t already, like Colin Beavan and I and surely countless other people have) but I’m asking you to become more aware.
So this brings me to the reason for this blog, and it’s really quite simple. By reading a tip or two from time to time, you start to see how easy some habits are to change. Others require a bit more effort, but after a period of transition, you wonder how you managed before (like my recent obsession with biking everywhere.) In the end, it’s up to you! My purpose is just to provide you with some ideas to start, and I look forward to hearing how you incorporated them, or why you didn’t choose to do certain things but feel strongly about others. I am also slowly making changes myself and am not a 'pro' in any sense of the word, so another reason to post about this is to try things out as I think or read of them, and either get or give support along the way.
At the end of the day, we shouldn’t feel guilty for who we are, what we enjoy and how we do it – but we should be open the possibility that certain things do not define us, and that there are many lessons left to be learned about ourselves in trying things a different way from time to time.
