Eco-wobbler

11/01/09

Posted by Rob

As a researcher you get used to hearing variations on the same response, wherever you go and whoever you talk to. My least favourite example of this is the one we hear when discussing environmentally friendly behaviours (an increasingly common subject for research these days): “What’s the point if it’s just me who’s making the change and the other people in my road/Americans/Big Business [delete as applicable] aren’t even bothering?” Yes: I know it’s a perfectly understandable sentiment but it really, really frustrates me. When I hear this for the umpteenth time I just want to grab the speaker by the lapels and shake them until they suddenly realise that small, individual changes can make a massive difference overall. I don’t do this, obviously, because a) it might upset the delicate group dynamic I’m going for and b) I’d get beaten up. So it came as something of a shock on a recent trip to India when I started to think the same thing. Kerala, South India styles itself as God’s Own Country and for the most part it’s pretty accurate – serene backwaters, golden beaches, soaring mountains. But at the edge of every town, tucked away from the main sights, it was all too easy to stumble across the local refuse facilities: typically a once serene bit of a backwater that is now a towering pile of unrecycled, probably unrecyclable rubbish. Just sitting there, stubbornly refusing to biodegrade and getting bigger every day.

It dawned on me that this must be happening everywhere. Not just in India: the same thing can probably be seen in most developing countries where the capability for dealing with packaging is outweighed by the sheer amount of stuff that gets thrown away. I stared at a dumping ground next to a beautiful tea plantation thinking of the scale of this and the sanctimonious, self-righteous potential-lapel-grabber in me started to think: how can making sure I stick a baked bean tin in the right box possibly mean anything when compared with this? I wobbled. It didn’t last long – my faith in the power of the individual was too strong for that. In some ways it made me want to do even more, and I had this vague notion that if there was enough demand for recycling from people like me then perhaps recycling could become easier and cheaper. Yet it made me realise how paralysing this sense of scale can be. Too many people have an image of individual action as being like bailing out a sinking boat with a spoon. Somehow that perception needs to be changed so that people can envisage the impact of a thousand spoons. But it won’t be changed by shaking them...