Maniates' Article & Group Discussions

Maniates' article, "Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do It," touches on a lot of the things that my group discussed in class last Wednesday. In our discussion, we agreed that individual action is not enough to prevent the environmental damage we are causing; as Maniates states, "We need to be looking at fundamental change in our energy, transportation, and agricultural systems..."

Unfortunately, the general attitude in the United States towards the environment is that helping the environment means doing a disservice to yourself and other people, in that it makes things cost more and makes us give things up. It is true that we're going to have to give up a lot to truly help the environment, and giving things up is certainly not a good thing, but the result of giving them up is vastly important and will greatly benefit humans and the planet.

What I see as the next important step in helping the environment is the promotion of this attitude- that helping is good, even if we have to give things up- throughout the United States and the rest of the world. In our group discussion, we agreed that it is unlikely for this viewpoint on the environment to become popular very quickly. We discussed the possibility that it will become popular only after a terrible environmental disaster with obvious, immediate effects. I am hopeful that more and more people will want to change their position before they are forced to by such an event. The "small things" that Maniates says don't really help the environment may actually be important in that they at least foster the general idea that helping the environment is good, even if they don't help much by themselves. We need to move beyond doing "easy" things, but the leap from no action to big action will probably only happen if something forces it to. Without such an event, there will have to be small action for some time before we can expect to see much big action.