Measuring our Environmental Impact
On Saturday night I was skimming through my Google Reader and landed on a Techcrunch post about the effect of commercial fryers on the environment. They highlighted the following impact:
“If every large vat fryer in the [country] met the new Energy Star requirements, energy cost savings would increase approximately $81 million per year and reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the emissions from nearly 95,000 cars.”
We really need a better way to communicate the environmental impact of our actions. Who decided that we should use cars as the primary unit of measurement? If you stop using plastic bags for your groceries, that’s like one car. Recycle all your cans, that’s like two cars, but one of them is a Hummer. Stop driving you car to work, that’s like five cars (trust us). Presenting gains in terms of theoretical cars off the road only confuses the matter and does little to connect with us on a personal level.
There’s a story in Made to Stick about when CSPI wanted to get people to stop eating buttered popcorn because of the tremendous amount of saturated fat that was in it at the time. They used the following language:
“A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!”
That story is tangible, relevant, and personal. They compare food with food and require no mental abstraction on the part of the listener. The facts are startling and make you think, “Do I really want this popcorn when I could have all this other good stuff instead?” Probably not.
We can also see this kind of clarity in the message charity:water uses to help raise donations. First, they lay out the enormity of the problem to show that it is worth your time.
One billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water.
If they stopped there, the enormity of the problem would be clear, but would also be daunting. Few potential donors would feel that anything they could do would make a dent in the situation. But, thankfully, they do not stop there. They make it simple, personal, and easy with the following two figures:
- $20 = clean, safe drinking water for one person.
- $5,000 = a well for a community.
And all of a sudden, my personal role in this huge problem is clear. All I need to do is come up with an Andy Jackson and I can help a single person get clean drinking water through the creation of a sustainable well.
I don’t know what the equivalent language is for understanding our environmental impact, but I’ll be thinking about it a lot. The best language might be tied to relative measurements. What is my impact relative to my neighbors? What’s the per capita impact of my community relative to neighboring communities? You could also make it about money. How much more does the greenest person on the block save than the most wasteful? Clearly I don’t have an answer yet, I just know it isn’t cars. If you know of folks doing compelling work in this area, please let me know.
