I was thinking the other day how people try to make sustainability and environmental thinking an easy task. People like to come up with easy tasks to do your part. This is done to make it seem easy to be “green” and encourage people to change their ways. While these steps are helpful, in the big picture they are not going to add up to make necessary changes. Being truly sustainable is not easy and this needs to be understood. I feel the more we make it seem easy the farther we are from facing the truth. Some steps will be easier to face, like adding solar panels to your roof to create your own energy. Other steps not so much, like eating less meat as a society, having our food systems become more local, eating in season, changing our energy consumption,and changing our transportation system. The list can go on and on.
Another thought that came to mind was the saying “it’s the thought that counts”. This saying needs to be taken out of our society because in many situations it is worthless. Especially in sustainability. The only thing that counts in sustainability are actions. We as a society are not going to get anywhere in sustainability if we just keep coming up with thoughts and are not changing our actions. Maybe we can start with the easy steps of recycling and taking shorter showers, but we do need to acknowledge the hard steps to come. Some of this needs to be on the government, since regulations need to be in their hands to make law abiding citizen follow suit, such as upping required gas mileage in cars or changing our current energy system.
There are many steps we need to take to be a sustainable society. It is time we accept the facts, stop thinking about it for future change and change our ways.
