‘They’ get mentioned at work a lot. I work on environmental issues, in a team of people doing the same. I’m not a lone environmentalist, I’m surrounded by people who are all aware, or should be aware, of the same things as me.
I hear lots about the fact ‘they’ need to get their homes retrofitted, ‘they’ aren’t recycling or lobbying their politicians at local or national level, ‘they’ can’t be bothered to even do the easy things. ‘They’ are hard to reach or won’t engage or only want to talk about other aspects of their home or go on about double glazing.
At work I’m constantly surprised at how people working on environmental issues forget how they themselves act. How few people are vegetarian let alone vegan – and how defensive many people can be in discussing making a change, even just for some meals or at environmental events. Most people still fly for pleasure, and do so frequently – and how little people want to engage in the impacts of that choice or do anything differently as a result. I thought I’d be an outlier having not retrofitted my home. Yet most people will do home improvements which involve spending lots of money but don’t include energy in the scope of the works.
Living lives on a day to day basis which don’t look much different to those who aren’t spending their working lives on climate and environmental issues. Not having the justification that they don’t have much of the detail or an understanding of what needs to be done – in some areas at least, even if not all of them.
Despite the subject matter we’re working on, it feels quite culturally normal to not live in a particularly environmentally friendly way. Challenging that feels very uncomfortable and mostly doesn’t happen. Some of that is understandable – if you’ve got to work with people day in, day out then most wouldn’t choose to be confrontational about things when you don’t need to be. Part of why, for me at least, I often don’t ask is because I find it so depressing when I do. It’s the same arguments as I hear elsewhere from people who don’t have anywhere near as much knowledge, interest or motivation than those I’m working with. What I’d expected to be a source of motivation can often exacerbate my concern about how much inaction there can is.
There’s also a lack of curiosity in so many people about the factors which limit their own environmental activity outside work. They are able to live with the cognitive dissonance and prefer that to trying to make changes in how they live. Giving explanations which excuse their behaviour – joking that planting a tree or two will offset the flights they are taking later in the month. A knowing joke but still ‘they’ make it and take the flight…
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