Cav's Place

Still trying to go through my drafts and actually get around to writing some of these posts instead of just letting them sit around here for years. This one seems to fit in quite well with a few other recent rants, because it deals with how to make people behave in a certain way, what works and what doesn’t when it comes to creating social change. It does start with a study, but I doubt one is needed in order to realize that creating an infrastructure allowing people to easily be “green” and ethical when it comes to their purchases would help a great deal, while continuing to focus on informing them about such issues will have little effect. Most people are going to take the easy route, or at least one which isn’t noticeably difficult, even if they know that it’s not the right one…

Now please don’t tell me that there are plenty of simple things anyone can do, because I’ve seen too many of those lists and many things written on them aren’t exactly easy to do, not to mention that most of those things would have too little impact anyway, or would at least balance out a positive impact in one area with a negative one in another. What we truly need is an infrastructure designed for environmentally conscious and ethical consumers to replace the existing one, which encourages wasteful and harmful choices. There could be some valid reasons to start some new informational campaigns once such an infrastructure would be in place, but it’s really a waste of time and resources to try to educate the masses before offering them the means to easily put this education to good use.
But requiring such an infrastructure doesn’t mean that we require others to build it for us. Those who are currently in positions of authority may have the best means of providing it for us, but they also have the least interest to do so, seeing as the current state of affairs got them in those positions of authority in the first place and, for better or worse, preserving it is probably their best chance of staying there. So we need to take matters into our own hands, use the masses whenever we have to and do whatever it takes to create this infrastructure and finally set things in motion. Otherwise it’s doubtful that we’ll get far…

Grassroots infrastructure doesn’t have to be that complicated to create. There are plenty of existing things we could use, such as places, people and behavior patterns. A simple example would be hiring poor people who look through trash to sort it, perhaps even collect it. Another would be having local shops take requests for environmentally friendly, fair-trade or otherwise ethical products that they couldn’t normally afford to stock without knowing whether they’d sell. Yet another would be having some people who do go to a good farmers’ market or other such location for themselves accept to make purchases for friends and neighbors as well. It might not exactly sound like what’s normally considered to be an infrastructure, but such things could actually create a pretty decent one, enough to get the job done until those in positions of authority could be somehow persuaded to create and maintain an even more solid one.
When it comes to the first example listed above, I keep hearing people from here saying that they won’t leave broken electronics out when there are announcements that they’ll be collected in order to be recycled, or even won’t drop things like magazines or plastic bottles into the appropriate containers, in the few places where such containers exist, because Gypsies would steal them. That may often be true, but I don’t see the problem. Firstly, you threw them away, so it’ll cause you no loss. Secondly, if they find a way to reuse those things, that’s even better than recycling; and if they take them to recycling centers in exchange for the small payment offered for this, the items are going to end up where they should have ended up anyway. Instead of a problem, I see this as an opportunity. In an ideal society, people wouldn’t need to do this in order to earn a living and they wouldn’t need to struggle to create such infrastructure either, but until that day will come we still have these problems and there’s a way to alleviate both of them. These people could actually be hired to collect and sort this type of trash, the payment being that they’ll be legally allowed to keep whatever they think they can reuse and whatever money the recycling centers will pay them for everything else. Basically, legalize what they’re doing anyway, just ask them to respect certain standards, such as disposing of useless items properly instead of just dumping them somewhere. It saves the regular people some trouble, it saves the authorities some trouble and it provides poor people with a legal way of earning a living. Everybody wins. (Actually, I heard that a company from here did see this opportunity. They caught some people searching through one of their landfills and hired them to sort the trash, separating what’s recyclable from what isn’t.)
Moving on to the second example, I think everyone realizes that local shops can’t generally afford to stock this kind of merchandise. Let’s face it, such products tend to cost more and sell less well than conventional products, so they’re a risk that small shops can’t take. But they could allow people to place firm orders for such products, possibly also requiring a certain deposit to be made in advance if they want to be on the safe side, and then deliver the products as soon as they receive them. If many of them would do this then they could also unite and negotiate with their suppliers with a single voice, so they could get better prices too. This would initially create visibility for these products, because people could get them from their local shops instead of having to go somewhere else specifically for them, without hurting small businesses. In time, this visibility would likely increase the demand, allowing more and more shops to safely stock such products and maybe someday phase out the wasteful, harmful and otherwise unethical ones. Once again, everybody wins. Everybody except those who make a living out of producing and selling those unethical products at least, but that’s certainly a good thing.
As for the last example, it’s rather similar to the second in a way. It does less for the visibility of these products, since the person going to shop for them can’t be expected to know what is going to be available in advance and they can make no guarantees about being able to actually purchase what the others asked them to either, but it would still make at least some of the right kind of products easier to obtain, which could increase the demand for them and, in the end, help the cause. The person would obviously also have to be very trustworthy, which isn’t something that one can just become overnight, so the process would likely be a slow one, but it could still help. In the end, even if many people still wouldn’t trust each other enough to make such an option immediately feasible, they could at least carpool. It would still make these products easier to obtain for some, while at the same time reducing the pollution generated by transportation. Eventually, if a certain group of people would keep shopping together like this for long enough, they could learn to trust each other enough to delegate one of them to shop for all. Then, if that trust won’t be betrayed, others could start to add their names to the scheme as well, helping create yet another element of this infrastructure.

There are many more things which could and should be done in order to create this kind of grassroots infrastructure and there are many more things to say even about these few examples listed above, but this should be enough for now. The bottom line is that we need to take matters into our own hands and create something like this, not wait for the authorities or corporations to do it for us. Stop trying to inform people, because those who are going to care tend to already know, and start making it easier for them to actually do these things that you keep trying to inform them about. Ideally, someday it will become easier to do the right thing than the wrong one, and that’ll most likely be the day when the masses will be on our side. Whether or not that day will come soon enough is up to us…