Our Conversation
Reasons it’s difficult to make changes to our own behaviour
- It’s hard because you’ve enjoyed things in the past (like travel, so you know what you’re missing.
- Doing the right thing isn’t always the fun thing.
- It can be more expensive (e.g. train travel vs flights).
- You don’t see the results of your actions. You can’t tell if it’s making a difference.
Reasons why we have doubts or feel conflicted about it.
- Individual actions are the least effective strategy.
- Individual actions don’t make much difference.
- We’re buying into the government ideology that focuses on individual responsibility.
- Why should I? We need the government to change things.
- There are too many different actions that we need to pay attention to.
- Even the concept of the carbon footprint is controversial.
Reasons why we still try to change our behaviour, even if we find it difficult to do or have doubts about its effectiveness
- It shows other people we care.
- It feels easier to focus on changing our own behaviour than trying to organise collective change.
- We feel guilt about the environmental damage that comes about from our actions.
- I want to live by my principles.
- We are connected to each other.
What could we do?
- Make it fun?
- Normalising doing the right thing would make it better.
- It’s okay to grieve for the things we miss.
- I want good news stories about when things are getting better and what works.
Questions we’d like to think about in the future:
- How do our actions fit into the big picture? How does what we do affect power structures?
- How can we make decisions about our behaviours and choices in a sensible way? How do we balance our desire to live by our values, and to do what we can, without buying into the idea that individual behaviour change is an appropriate solution to the climate crisis?
- Why do some things trouble us sometimes and others don’t? We could relate to the experience of sometimes taking a lot of trouble to make an environmentally friendly decision, and other times not thinking about it at all.