WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

Chris Magwood, co-author of More Straw Bale Building and Straw Bale Details, has been thinking lately about social change and how to achieve it. This article originally appeared on his blog and is reprinted by permission. Thanks Chris!

Will People Really Change?

It's pretty easy to despair about the amount of inaction on environmental matters at the government level. The collapsed talks in Copenhagen are only the latest example, and it's tempting to assume that the people electing those governments are equally averse to change.

But I don't think that's true. I think that people change and adapt rather quickly and usually with a minimum of grumbling when change is either foisted on them or, better yet, when they feel pressured to change by their peers.

For example, recently I talked about composting toilets. Of course, the big hurdle with composting toilets is getting people to actually turn around and deal with their own waste. Most of us would rather not do that.

But rather not and will not are very different. A case in point (which is quite relevant to the subject at hand) is the stoop-and-scoop etiquette that is completely widespread in this country. Just last week, I watched a very well dressed, older woman (fur coat, leather boots, makeup... none of the trappings I'd associate with a hard-core environmentalist) stop on the sidewalk, bend over and use a plastic bag over her hand to pick up her dog's crap. She then carried that little baggie for as far as I could watch her walk, at least a few blocks and possibly more.

Now, if she can be trained to physically handle her dog's fresh and warm feces, surely she can be trained to handle a well designed compost tray from a composting toilet once a month or so. So how did we do it? How did we train her (and millions of otherwise normal, non-feces handling citizens) to willingly wrap their mitts around a warm, stinking bag of dog doo?

Part of the training came from government edicts. Most towns and cities enacted stoop-and-scoop by-laws at some point in the last 20 years. Fines were created, public awareness campaigns run... the usual tools of public persuasion. More important, I think, was peer pressure. Nobody likes having somebody else's dog do its business on the lawn, mainly because we don't like stepping in it. Before the by-laws, we might have complained to a dog's owner, or even attempted to compel them to pick up. Once we had the by-law behind us, it was even easier to vocalize our discontent. In fact, our discontent was assumed, and therein lay its power.

I doubt very much that it's a fear of arrest and fine that makes most dog owners pick up after their pets. It's the discomfort of knowing that they are being watched, and if they are not living up to their civic responsibility, they will be silently or overtly judged (it doesn't matter much which one).

Many of us know that we are directly polluting our own waters when we flush our feces down the toilet. It might not be quite as visceral as stepping in dog doo, but as somebody living next to a river in a city, some days it's not that far off. But what we haven't started to do is compel our leaders to legislate against it and, more importantly, to apply social pressure on others to recognize the mess they are making. In the same contemptuous way we now treat those whose dogs are not followed with plastic baggies, we need to let our culture-mates know that shitting in our drinking water is yucky. We need to be willing to say to others, "Really, you still do that?"

I've watched people start using reusable shopping bags in the space of a year. Peer pressure did that. Nobody wanted to stand at the check out line and do the equivalent of saying, "I don't give a darn, give me the disposable plastic." I think we can affect plenty of change on that level. We have to let people know what the problem is, and then let them know that their participation in the problem is no longer okay with everybody else.

"Curb your pet" was on posters, television commercial, even t-shirts when the campaign started. It became part of the public discourse, and it became socially unacceptable to stop paying attention to the issue. Nobody wanted to pick up dog shit, but we all felt obliged. Now, it's normal.

"Don't foul my water" could be equally ubiquitous, and equally successful. And so could many other environmental changes.