SubscribeTrade in your Honda Civic for a sweet mountain bike! It's time to cut costs and make sacrifices! "Take the plunge": Bike To Work Video-The Environmental Blog
I agree with you smelly biking businessman. Lets not get too hasty. The media, and maybe some celebrities (LEO!!!) may tell us about the impending doom of the Earth, but what crosses the line between necessary and absurd?
The Environmental Blog discusses the "Green Movement"--from adding bike lanes to recycling, they advocate for a better environment and report on today’s important "green" stories and innovations.
But even they are human too. Please. We cannot all be the “golden child” in this family. The media says we're either good or were bad, clean or dirty, corporate or hippy. It seems to me that we’ve resorted to guilt tripping and "making the best of it". Sounds a lot like a family vacation gone wrong.
If you truly want to be green, we need to start making societal changes, not just individual ones. We no longer will have a guilty conscience fostered by commercials, celebs, and trendy fundraisers (even if there are crab cakes)!
What these people make salient is that the world can be improved for the greater good if we just made simple changes in our daily lives! However, as this video proves, not everyone feels that way. People who make changes are seen as "hippies", rather than the environmentalists they truly are. Maybe people are inherently selfish, or maybe they just don't want helmet hair.
Either way, the problem is that the media is not effectively tapping into what our culture is really about. The Americans I know want comfort, reassurance, McDonalds, and Uggs. Ok, maybe that’s just me on a Sunday night. But still, we cannot depend on all these selfless environmentalists to save the world for us!
They've defined the problem. MANY times. The environment sucks. It’s your fault. Fix it. This message doesn't exactly resonate with the American public. There lacks a connection between social norms, and sustainable behaviors--if we viewed biking to work as a social norm, rather than something for people who wear Tevas and socks, then we may have something.
On Teaching Green Psych, a website dedicated to studying how minds work in response to environmental concern, they confirmed this idea with a study on littering. In the findings by Cialdini, "environmental campaigns emphasize [how] all the bad behaviors people do may backfire in that they inadvertently draw attention to descriptive norms for anti-environmental behavior".
It all comes back to social and cultural norms. Biking to work across four lanes of traffic for that "rush of sheer terror" is not anyone’s idea of a great morning commute. Although it sounds nice to save money on gas, and get some exercise, biking is not an ideal "green" activity for all. Something must be done about air pollution, but if it’s not “hip”, society will revert back to their old ways.
Rachel Omri
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