Sustainability needs Medium-sized goals
In Sustainability, we talk too much about micro and macro goals—but we need to embrace medium-sized goals.
There are times in our lives when we focus on the big goals: getting a degree, formalizing a partnership, landing our first job. But we can’t take on too many of these simultaneously, and they can be quite daunting, often taking years to prepare for.
If we only focus on small goals: getting to work on time, answering our emails for the day, the tedium grinds us down, and we usually don’t manage to get beyond equilibrium. We don’t find life exciting and we don’t have much to share.
When I speak to friends about their lives, they often frame the conversation by talking about their medium-size goals—moving house, modest changes in their business model, signing up for a class, improving their fitness. We change our lives through these medium size goals—they are manageable, and within our control. They don’t need years to accomplish. They can often be done on our own or with a little help from the people around us, and when we need a change, we focus on them and they give us energy and make us feel optimistic.
Medium-scale goals usually lend themselves to being broken down into smaller tasks, so we can tackle them as our everyday life goes on. Most people have strategies about how to achieve medium sized goals, where sometimes the big goals (writing that first novel) elude us.
I think a lot about sustainability, and I find that almost all our conversations about it are focused on its smallest or largest aspects. Things that are either nearly insignificant (let’s not use plastic straws in some of our fast food outlets!) or out of our scope of influence (we have to keep climate change to 1.5 degrees C). I love seeing young kids marching for climate change, but a march is a reflection of frustration, not a solution in and of itself. Its not clear how it might influence politicians, say. (here were are, on course for Brexit). Displays of dismay don’t always win against established political structures…though for what it’s worth, more spontaneous outbursts are still a signal to people in power that they they’re not solving problems we care about.
I’m no longer interested in plastic straws—or rather, not unless they are shown to be an entry-level test of how we can realistically make change. As soon as plastic straws hit the news, we got the pushback as Trump started selling branded plastic straws on his political website.
Basically, we’re missing the point.
We have a narrow window of opportunity to make significant enough changes that mean the next generation is going to inherit a viable environment. We need to change the equation. We keep saying that. But realistically how are we going to get there?
Around the world we see sustainable projects driven by need: inventive micro-hydro, micro-solar, water sterilization, and other projects created with tiny budgets. My friend in Groningen, ND, takes her plastic bottles to a facility where they are digested by enzymes. She’s a bit alarmed by it, but its pretty cool. By next year it will be ordinary. Many Japanese people have had under-sink compost compactors for years. We can make packaging out of potatoes, algae, mushrooms. Why then are we throwing out so much plastic waste? We can’t eliminate this one straw at a time—we are too late for the one straw approach.
A few years ago I set out to progressively make my life more sustainable and decided to set medium-term goals, rather than taking a scatter-shot approach. This way I can monitor my progress and see if I’m being truthful and successful. My first goal was more sustainable transport. I was already riding an electric bike for my daily commute, but I was making up to 7 inter-continental round-trip flights per year. I made almost no progress in year one besides offsetting all my flights (a tiny, but worthwhile strategy for those who can’t budge on flights at all), but in year 2, I’m down 50% compared to last year. I’m lucky that I now spend most of my time in the UK and can take trains to Europe. I still have a way to go.
Next was to reduce energy use by 50% in my home, which I was renovating, so I upgraded doors, flooring and appliances specifically aiming for energy reduction, and specifying natural materials such as fallen timber, engineered flooring and reconstituted stone: Hard-wearing finishes that would last as long as I do and use waste products where practical. My energy bill is down 43% and with the exception of one finishing product (natural stone I used for cladding) the materials complied. In a few years I’ll have paid for the upgrades with my lower bills.
Easiest of all: I finished off all the toxic cleaning chemicals in my cupboard and switched to three natural products: a liquid all-purpose soap, an Ecover pellet-type dish detergent, and the same brand’s toilet-cleaner. I increased my composting and reduced my landfill waste by 75%. I’m saving money, my flat smells natural and I suddenly have an entire cupboard free.
This year’s goal is hard, to reduce plastic waste by 90%. I’ve weighed it for the past few months. Luckily my local green grocer and the next-door store that measures stuff into brown paper bags can help. I have a yogurt maker and the local shop will supply me glass-bottle milk. I find that there are options for food in tins (easy to recycle) vs plastic cartons (not). It reduces the amount of choice, but does that really matter that much? My choices compared to 2 decades ago are infinitely expanded, I can be satisfied. I’m joining petitions to the larger supermarkets to cut their plastic waste and intend to badger them, and finally to shun their products if they don’t move fast enough. This stuff is not that difficult and often doesn’t take any more time or energy than doing things the “normal” way. It just takes a bit of organizing, setting a start date and being clear about the objective. The fact is that we all need to do it or our planet will literally choke from plastic rubbish. Recyclables are not the solution… They take petrol to transport them there and they’re being burnt on rubbish tips in Malaysia and in Vietnam. Banning plastic straws make people feel better for some reason, but they don’t mean anything in the wider scheme of things: we have to stop using plastic Q-tips, baby wipes, inert nappies, Styrofoam clamshells, wastefully packaged beauty products.
My friends and I discuss this stuff. We’re trading tips. We’ll find out which grocery stores to patronize and who is offsetting their carbon.
Hopefully in another year we’ll have moved on to other goals since we’ll have solved these and won’t be going back. I hope we’ll have plenty of company. And if we can cope with medium-sized changes, maybe we’ll be ready for the big ones if they become necessary—or maybe we can push back the deadline with enough of our individual actions.