Getting Your Friends on Board with Sustainability

I just read the following post on Twitter from Practically Green:

How to get your employees engaged in sustainability? ow.ly/ka0mV Practically Green provides a fun, user-friendly platform!
— Practically Green (@practicallygrn) April 17, 2013

I clicked on the link, taking me to their homepage.

My first thought of "Building better people"
 may be a little too vague and dystopian.

It was interesting stuff. The idea reportedly started as "LEED® for people". A very cool idea in my opinion, and I also suspect that there is a super-catchy slogan hiding in there somewhere.

However, there is another topic the tweet alluded to which I think we can all take a moment to consider:

How do we, as people, make environmental goals known, thought well of, and taken up?

There aren't exactly a lot of people who would disagree with the idea that making sure that we have enough resources to survive for as long and as well as possible is a bad idea.

That being said, there is some challenge in getting the population as a whole to shift over to 100% sustainable practices overnight. While having no impact on the environment is certainly possible, efforts like these may be seen by somebody "not-yet-interested" as too big of a transition to simply drop everything and do it.

Impossibly awesome?

To a non-environmentalist, it may look like far too much to do, and like it's far too difficult to start now. But you and I know very well that it's too big of an issue to do nothing about. So we have a bit of a problem.

The solution for that would be to do the little things first.

Say that you have a friend who doesn't have any focus on any environmental issues. Not that this person hasn't heard of them, or that they oppose them. He/she just doesn't pay much attention. What would be a good way to show that friend something that he could understand?

This is the most fun we've had scrolling
in years. Seriously.

You start by finding something that he/she can understand without too much effort. Like that burning hatred of junkmail. Or reducing his water footprint by eating chicken instead of beef, or other easy little water saving tips like not leaving the water running while shaving or brushing one's teeth. Something like using a reusable bag for grocery shopping.

Really ANY of the myriad ways that most of you environmental advocates already know about will do for the purposes of enlightening friends on environmental issues. It's not much work, and it'll give that friend a little bit of the idea that something can be done.

Now, it may have come to your attention that the things just referred to all have to do with conservation and efficiency, and not necessarily sustainability.

Well, here's the beauty of it! Outside of what you actually did to buy time for the environment as a whole, these little things have a profound effect. You've convinced somebody that they can, as an individual, actually DO something to help the environment.

From here, we can  start upping the gradient and moving towards all of the cool, exciting sustainability projects like fuel and farming, as well as helping make sustainable culture more accessible.

So you can quickly use efficiency as an introduction to sustainability at a very grassroots and personal level.

Pretty cool, right?