Environmental Conscience

Hey all! I'm Lucy, I'm a junior International Studies major trying to decide on my functional field. I've never blogged before, and am a pretty technologically challenged person in general, so I hope that this posts correctly! I'm in this class for a lot of reasons: I'm considering environmental politics as my functional area for my major, I studied abroad this summer in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is a pretty environmentally conscious place and also where the Copenhagen climate change Summit is going to be taking place. Also, I want to learn more about what I can do to help the environment, because I want my future grandkids to be able to ski in Colorado and play in a park and live on the Earth.

I think that Stanley Fish, in his blog from August 3, 2008, I Am, Therefore I Pollute, views environmental protection the way that a lot of people do: as something that is vaguely menacing as a future event, but not currently concerning enough to change their lifestyle. By now, I think that there is no way that climate change can be denied (although people will try). The problem is no longer so focused on whether or not climate change is occuring (it is). The issue has now become: will enough people decide to be more environmentally consciencious that it will slow down the process of global warming?

I want to think that they will. I want to believe that everyone in the United States will make adjustments to their lifestyles which will benefit this planet and maybe do a little something to reduce the horrible destruction that humans have done to the Earth. But the reality is that most people will be horrified by climate change when they hear about it from such films as "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore or if they go to an environmental lecture or anything else trying to raise awareness about climate change. And then they'll go home. And they'll think to themselves, "I should recycle all my newspapers." Maybe they will...for awhile. And then eventually life will go back to normal. They'll convince themselves that the environmental problem is something for someone else to deal with, for another generation to tackle.

I don't think that people don't change their lifestyles because they don't care about the environment. Most people, when you talk to them, feel that the environment should be protected. It's just that they have grown up living a certain way, and many people find it hard to change the way things have always been. Call it lazyness, stubborness, anything. It's still a large group of people who aren't going to do much to help the environment.

To live in an "environmentally friendly" way in the US, I think that we could all probably do more. I've always prided myself in being someone who tries to be consciencious about the environment: I always turn out the lights, recycle, don't eat much meat, occasionally shop at Whole Foods etc. From calculating my eco-footprint, however, I learned that my footprint is bigger than I would like it to be. If everyone on the planet consumed as much as me, we would need a few more earths. That was pretty distressing to learn, so I'm going to try and do better. Maybe living in an "environmentally friendly" way means continually being open to learning more about what we can do to help the environment, and realizing that there's always more to learn.