Let me start by setting a couple scenes.
You observe a group of classmates leaving a football game—one of them has a plastic water bottle that they are about to throw into the trash can when…
“Hey, you should recycle that” (Person 2)
The person with the water bottle and the others in the group give a questioning look to Person 2. At which point, Person 2 says “Oh. I was just kidding.”
You walk into the bathroom of your dorm. Conveniently, the lights are already on. You start brushing your teeth, when one of your hallmates walks in and turns on the shower. The hallmate proceeds towards the sink to wash a couple dishes, so you make a casual remark about the water not taking that long to heat up. You notice the sign from Sustainable Duke that is staring both of you in the face, so you mention that a minute equals 2.5 gallons of water. The response you get in return: “Yea, I’ll be fast. It’s not a big deal.”
You are working on planning an event with one of the campus groups you are involved in and are looking for a theme. Someone suggests that you try to make it environmentally conscious.
The president of the committee: “Sustainability is overdone. Everyone is just hopping onto the trend. There’s been too much of it.”
All of these scenes illustrate the mindset/culture regarding sustainability and environmental stewardship on this campus. Is sustainability is just a trend that we ride until it’s no longer cool? Is it just part of the Duke University brand, something that we sell to make our school standout and be more appealing? A message that got lost in translation to the campus culture? I think that it’s easy to get caught up in our social culture, one that says it’s uncool to care and one that tells us life is a competition to see who can care the least. It is one which still falls towards effortless perfection. We brag I can do X, Y and Z and succeed without putting in time and effort into it. We flaunt I am fortunate enough, privileged enough, to be unaware of the consequences of my actions. Sometimes it’s that we don’t notice, but oftentimes, it appears that we just can’t be bothered to care.
A large part of this apathy stems from how far removed we are from the consequences of our actions. It has become hard for us to care simply because there are structures that help us avoid our problems. We want energy at our finger tips but hate the idea of smog-lined cities so we have electric lines transport our electricity from further away. We want our houses to be clean and clutter-free without seeing the dump, or the river, where all our waste ends up. We want cheap food year round, and it doesn’t matter how far it has to travel to get to our plates.
These things have been done for our convenience, but they also allow us to avoid acknowledging the consequences in the meantime. Out of sight, out of mind. It becomes hard to believe that our actions have an impact. Leaving the faucet on as we brush our teeth, keeping the lights on when we leave a room, or throwing leftovers away, we don’t see it. As a society, we keep ourselves removed from the consequences of our actions, and it allows us to avoid the guilt and to avoid having to care.
However, the other large part of this campus apathy is fear. Like any relationship, it is hard to know if your efforts are going to have any impact on the end result, and fear makes it difficult to be vulnerable and to admit that you care. In the case of environment, it is a care for the planet and future generations, and everything that makes authentic relationships hard is made harder by the fact that the thing you can choose to care about is more abstract and less personal.
To this, I want to introduce the idea of emergence. The environment we have now wasn’t always like this—it deteriorated as a consequences of our day to day choices. The theory also states that systems formed by emergence can be dismantled by emergence. So your individual actions shape the larger system of apathy and that if you don’t like the world we live in, you have the power to do something.
So this is a plea to open your eyes. See beyond the immediate bubble of convenience and think about the larger consequences of actions. Is it a world you would want your children to live in? And remember, you have the power to act.
Victoria Cheng is a Trinity junior. Her column is the second installment in a semester-long series of biweekly columns written by members of Environmental Alliance.
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