Originally appears in the Spring 2006 issue
Environmental ethics are the root of environmental education and ground the promise that we can restore and maintain a healthy balance between humans and all other life, including Earth’s living systems. Yet, while environmental ethics courses often address theories of our duty to the natural world, they are less eloquent on the question of what motivates people to act and why people fail to act. Our students frequently say that they feel overwhelmed by their sense of environmental crisis and that they perceive their own actions as insignificant, a feeling that causes apathy and inaction. Many environmentalists interpret this inaction as humanity’s inherent selfishness or shortsightedness. We reject this fatalistic worldview. Instead, we choose to believe that inaction often stems from the simple fact that, feeling overwhelmed, students do not know where to start. We have created an experiential assignment that allows college students to explore these questions of motivation and at the same time enhances their motivation to act. Because the question of motivation applies to all ages, and the answers that the students discover are personal ones, the assignment would be appropriate for K–12 students as well.
Methods
In this assignment, students are asked to modify a current habit and/or adopt some regular action that they think will improve the health of their environment or the Earth. We have run the assignment for different periods, ranging from a few weeks to several months. The assignment has two purposes. First, it encourages students to reflect on the relationship between their habits and their values and allows them to discover how easily they can adopt an action that they believe will improve the health of the Earth. Second, by showing them the effectiveness of their actions, the assignment demonstrates to students that they personally can make a difference.
In the first part of the assignment, students complete a handout that asks them to outline and clarify their proposed project. In their proposals, students describe what the action is, how often they will do it, what makes it “environmental,” and why it will lead to an improvement. These proposals are not graded, nor do we evaluate them on the basis of whether we agree that the project would improve the Earth; rather, we read them only to make sure that each student has a project that is practicable and can be documented. In this way, we try to create a safe learning environment for healthy risk-taking and experimentation.
Projects might involve actions that seem diametrically opposed to the health of the environment. As troubling as it might be to have a student adopt the practice of regularly littering (this did happen once), the student might learn just as much from this practice as from half-heartedly adopting a practice of picking up litter. Our hands-off approach to judging the value of their action is not based on a belief that ethics are relative or subjective. Rather, we believe that it is important for the students to choose their own practice so that they become aware of obstacles that challenge their motivation or ability to act upon their own ideas.
We look for clarity and specificity in a proposal. Some students will propose a variety of practices, all of which might be good for the Earth but would be difficult to track. We ask them to pick one action to track for the project. We also look for actions that are performed regularly (a few times per week). For the purposes of the assignment, we encourage students to change some action that they do frequently, rather than aim for a few environmental acts, even if they are significant. Students typically choose practices such as recycling, composting, walking to class instead of driving, taking shorter showers, or becoming vegetarian. Some practices (e.g., composting) are more appropriate when the assignment runs over a longer period of time.
In their proposals, students are also asked to identify various ways of documenting their practice. First, we ask them to identify some means of keeping track of what they experience or learn. For example, how will they document their roommates’ (or siblings’/parents’) reactions to their new behavior? Typically, this involves a journal. Second, we ask students to identify some means of keeping track of their success or failure in adhering to their practice. Some students who have adopted a practice of reducing toilet flushes (“if it’s yellow, let it mellow”) have placed a chart above their toilet to record how many times they flush it. We also ask them to come up with some quantitative measures for the project. For example, if the project is recycling paper, how many pounds of paper did they recycle? In addition, we ask them to speculate about and quantify some sort of secondary benefit, some public good resulting from their action. For example, pounds of recycled paper translate into saved trees; walking instead of driving to class reduces carbon emissions. The students might need to do some preliminary research to identify a secondary benefit associated with their action and will usually need to conduct additional research later in order to quantify it. Identifying measurable secondary benefits might involve some creativity. For example, a project to spend ten minutes a day meditating in a natural setting could yield a measure of kilowatts of electricity saved by not watching television.
Finally, we ask students to speculate about some ways in which they could depict the project visually or graphically. For example, a student who practices picking up trash three times a week for ten minutes could photograph the area before and after each visit. The student could also produce a graph that measures the amount of trash found at the spot each week.
In approving the proposals, we are not concerned with whether students will adhere to the chosen practice as long as they are willing to record their failure. For example, some students adopt the practice of using only recyclable food containers, and to a certain degree most fail to adhere to this practice. Nonetheless, the project fulfills the purposes of the assignment since students can easily track the number of times they used a non-recyclable container, as well as the experience of trying to adopt this practice. Similarly, a student who fails to reduce his showering time to five minutes still could complete the assignment if he accurately records the time he spent in the shower. Moreover, an ambitious project for one student might not be so for another student. One student reported that a project to turn off the water while he shaved was “torture,” but another student had significant success in a project to purchase nothing but essential food (and to buy only organic and unpackaged foods).
We sometimes encounter students who have trouble thinking of a practice to adopt because they “do so much already.” Some brainstorming usually generates at least a few possibilities. One question we ask these students is whether they are thinking of improving the health of the Earth only in terms of reducing the negative effect they have on it. We suggest that they consider taking on a project in which their regular actions address the effects that others have as well. A student might, for example, adopt the practice of asking another person to ride the bus with her each day.
Once we have provided approval and feedback on the proposals, the students begin to put them into practice. Some projects will require that the students gather baseline data. For example, students who want to shorten shower time by 50 percent will first need to determine the current duration of their showers. While most practices take place outside of the classroom, we allow some class time for students to discuss their projects with each other. We ask them to discuss how the project is coming along, what challenges they are encountering, and what they are finding interesting about it.
Reporting
Near the end of the period of their practice, we give the students a handout to guide them in writing up their reflections on the project (see sidebar). We encourage them to answer the questions in a format that they find comfortable. Some students narrate their experience of the practice, others write a standard essay, while some write scientific papers — posing a hypothetical question and then using the practice as a sort of experiment to test the hypothesis. We evaluate these reflections for completeness (rather than success) and for the student’s ability to translate the experiment into some graphical illustration. A student who accurately documents his or her inability to take shorter showers would receive a better grade than a student who records “great success” but supplies no data to corroborate it.
Results
Students generally report that they like the environmental practice assignment. Many find it surprising that they were actually asked to “do something” (as opposed to just think about it) in a college course. At the middle school or high school level, this project could provide parents and teachers with a rich context for engaging students in deeper discussions about both action and inaction and the greater impact of each on other people and the Earth. Even students who are unsuccessful in achieving their desired results often enjoy both the practical aspect and the self-reflective aspect of the assignment. Most discover something enjoyable about the practice. One student who had previously commuted 45 minutes by car to class each way found that her hour-long bus ride provided more time to study and was less stressful than the drive. Likewise, a high school student who chose to commute to school by bike rather than by car could experience the fitness benefits of biking.
Most students discover a complex and interesting set of factors that affect their motivation and actions. They learn about a variety of obstacles that arise between their beliefs and their actions. For example, how often do they simply forget to bring their own bags to the grocery store? How often do they absentmindedly throw paper in the trash rather than into the recycling bin? What do they do when they remember? Students also learn what sorts of reasons they use to excuse themselves from their practice. If their project is to reduce their water usage, what happens when their family and friends start commenting on their hygiene? Many students notice that they afford a different degree of justification to these excuses at the time they make them than they do later upon reflection.
Moreover, students typically learn something about how their actions affect and are affected by people around them. They find that while their habits are personal, they are also very much the result of social forces. By changing what they normally do, students expose themselves to examination by others. A passerby asked a student picking up trash what she did to deserve (court-ordered) community service. One student who brought veggie burgers to his fraternity barbecue was chastised for being a hippie. Frequently, students who start some sort of recycling project are frustrated when their roommate, sibling, or parent puts recyclables in a trashcan next to the recycling bin. Of course, not all the interactions students have with other people because of their projects are negative. Many students’ friends and roommates join in the practice, sometimes becoming the real leaders in the project. This enables students to recognize the powerful influence of modeling and that the greatest effect of their project may be motivating others, by example, to examine and change their own behavior. Many students realize that if others adopted their practice as well, a tangible effect on the environment would result. They see that their project was easy and would be easy for others.
Many students also report feeling less overwhelmed by their sense of environmental crisis. Some write that rather than convincing themselves that their project could make a difference, simply doing something, however small, made them feel less overwhelmed. Although every project is minuscule and the students know this, taking some action relieves the stress caused by inaction. Having a weekly opportunity to talk openly about their project experience, students are able to share their frustrations and successes. This creates a sense of “we are all in this together” and encourages mutual support. One way we guide this discussion is by asking students to consider not only the obstacles but also the pathways to their desired actions. Additionally, students are asked to reflect deeply to discern which obstacles and pathways are part of their external environment (e.g., “my school does not have a recycling program”) and which stem from their own internal beliefs (e.g., “my actions don’t matter anyway”). This awareness that obstacles and pathways to success have both internal origins (in oneself) and external origins (in others) is one of the most exciting and promising outcomes of the project. Students consistently report that with this shift in awareness, they are far more motivated to take action and to share publicly their action and beliefs about the environment.
In connecting their practice with some of the course readings, most students easily see how one of the assigned authors could endorse their practice. Assigned readings from Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation are frequently cited in support of altering eating practices. Readings from Hunter and Amory Lovins’ Natural Capitalism are referenced for those projects that saved the students money. Most frequently, students refer to Hope’s Edge, by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe. In this wonderful book (part narrative, part philosophical theory, part recipe book), the authors argue that various “thought traps” shape the way we perceive the world and are responsible for our creation of hunger, poverty, and environmental devastation. For example, if we believe that people are inherently selfish, then we will believe that solutions involving community are prone to be less successful. If we face a scarcity of food, then the risks of biotechnology will seem more justifiable. The book provides case studies that counter these thought traps, just as students’ project experiences often provide personal counterexamples. For example, students sometimes receive help that is given freely and not out of calculated self-interest. Moreover, a project such as composting can demonstrate the principle that abundance can be found in apparent waste. Although the results are personal, the students see how easily they are applicable to other people.
The readings we have mentioned would be accessible to middle and high school students. Nonetheless, we do not think that teachers need to incorporate any advanced materials into their curriculum for this assignment to be effective in a K–12 setting. The primary benefits of the assignment are personal awareness that results from self-reflection, and learning about the values of one’s social environment. For most students, the connection to the readings is probably the least interesting aspect of their reflection papers and the personal experiences and interactions the most interesting.
This assignment has motivated us, as instructors, to experiment with new practices. We see that so many actions are simply the result of habit and not choice; and when we see the success of our students in changing these habits, it encourages our own actions. Indeed, selecting an environmental practice of our own to change (and sharing it with the students) can be a great way of earning credibility with students. Students see that environmental ethics require walking the talk and that their instructors run up against the same challenges as they do.
We have offered this assignment for three years, and former students sometimes tell us that they are still practicing their project. Some have taken on new practices as well. One student who quit driving for the semester reported not having driven for two years since. Another student who once ate red meat three times a day is still practicing vegetarianism. Another who had nearly completed his undergraduate degree in environmental studies reported that the project allowed him finally to align his academic learning about the environment and his day-to-day lifestyle in a way that left him feeling passionate rather than fearful about his future environmental work. The exciting thing for us is not that we have converted students to a particular way of life (many students adopt practices that we might not believe are morally optimal), but that we have helped our students to see what sorts of obstacles they are likely to encounter in effecting change and have given students a demonstration of their ability to take positive action.
Guidelines for Environmental Practice Paper
Part A: Write a five- to seven-page essay that addresses the following questions:
-
- 1. What was your environmental practice?
2. What did you think you would learn:
- about the environment?
- about yourself?
- about other people?
- 3. What ways did you set up to track your practice?
- Qualitative
- Quantitative
-
- 4. How successful were you in maintaining your practice?
5. To what extent did you fail? Why?
6. What were the results?
- Qualitative
- Quantitative
-
- 7. What measurable secondary benefits can you derive? (For example, if you recycled cans, how many pounds of aluminum did you save? How much electricity does that save?) Be sure to cite your sources.
8. From your practice, what did you learn:
-
- about the environment?
- about yourself?
- about other people?
9. What difference would your practice make:
- if 5 people adopted your project?
- if 1,000 people adopted your project?
- if 1,000,000 people adopted your project?
10. Discuss how your practice relates to two of the readings from the semester.
11. Does your practice primarily affect environmental values that you have already formed, or does it encourage evolution of new environmental values? Explain.
12. What other similar practices could you adopt that are consistent with this practice?
13. What changes do you now plan to make to your life (if any) in regard to your environmental habits?
Part B: Append a chart of your quantitative results and some pictorial representation, such as illustrations or photos that you created in order to track your project.
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John P. Engel teaches in the Department of Environmental Studies at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and advises graduate students at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona. Daniel Sturgis teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.