Green Fatigue
A significant change that the environmental movement wants to see take root in society, has to be achieved by accentuating the positive. There is evidence this is happening: cycling is being promoted and is being taken up in force. There is a greater emphasis on the benefits of using a bike: environmental (cutting down on emissions), social (improves health) and economic (two wheels are cheaper than four).
Global economics has a role to play. The notion of a ‘throw-away society’ illustrates perfectly just how unsustainable modern living has become, and this has been caused by a global economic system that often makes it cheaper to go out and buy new things, well before we actually need them. Thus, we shouldn’t be quite so please with ourselves when heading to the local dump and having the capacity to recycle everything from televisions to clothes, only to then drive off to the nearest shopping mall and stocking up again. Somehow the focus on ‘recycle’ rather than ‘reduce’ sums up where the environmental message sits right now.
And yet, there is a fantastic opportunity to change people’s way of thinking. Recent studies have shown that our happiness has little to do with the possessions we own. The opposite indeed seems to be the case.
It’s encouraging that governments, for example in the UK and France, are more interested than they have been in the past, in measuring people’s happiness. A proposed general happiness index may have drawn sniggers from hard-nosed economic commentators, but it’s what the environmental movement has believed for a long time, they just have not communicated it very well.
So as people in many developed countries face much harder economic choices, as a result of the recent economic crises, the climate could be right for a new kind of environmental message: one that doesn’t harass people in making changes, but suggests that making lifestyle changes may bring benefits to their wallets as well as to their general wellbeing.
Reference Hybrid Cars: The Evolution of the Hybrid Car