When we hear something about the environment, we often think of recycling trash, turning off thing when not needed and all of those stuff. To be honest, when asked to do the regular procedures, do you ever wonder if it really even impacted the environment? Does this small action by you really matter? Some things are too small, they might as well be considered non-existent, yes?
When I said small, I meant irrelevant—like a vote amongst thousands and thousands of people in a country. If you do not vote, it does not matter, yes? Surely one vote will not make a single difference. Sure, one of the mainstream thing to do is recycling—but how about turning off the lights? I am sure that people are motivated to do so more because it saves electricity and helps reduce bills. When making a choice, people do not just say, “I won’t do X because it saves the environment!”—they think about the other advantages or disadvantages and even discarding the environmental factor because it’s so irrelevant. For example, a choice to use the car—if the person uses the car, they think about the cost of the gas consumption and how long would it take to get to the destination with or without a car. I assure you, they wouldn’t not ride a car because it’s releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In the modern time, environment is sometimes still considered irrelevant—with understandable reason. It’s just so hard to justify sacrificing something when we as an individual isn’t impactful. Yes, you might argue tings like recycling did impact and will continue to impact, but why? Because it successfully became a trend to do it and pushed the masses into doing the same thing, but when all these new news saying that it isn’t enough comes up, like “the sea might be empty by x year!” or “Trees of X region might be no more by Y year!” it seems apparent that this is not enough.
The thing we should be focusing on instead of trying to create new so-called “solutions” is how we can make existing solutions actually come to work to affect the masses and for it to make an actual impact. However, by thinking about this comes another problem—how? It is true that, there is a lot of hypocrisy around the community. People boast about doing X thing even though they still do that said thing, because the environmental factor can once again, be irrelevant. To be frank, we live in an unlucky timeline where some things are hard to justify.
It’s not all bad and gloomy though—in the past, some has succeeded. Social influence is a big thing—it always has been. On October 25, Youtuber named Mr Beast started a project called team trees. It aimed to plant a total of 20 million trees. It succeeded, because Mr Beast was already a huge social influencer with a huge following, creating that social influence. He was transparent and showed what would be done with the money. People would totally donate their already favorite social media.
Influencer to do something good and impactful to the word at once. People knew that Mr Beast’s project would bring impact, unlike doing something individual like reducing car use just because we have to give something else up. Yes, an individual’s donation to team trees is also very little and irrelevant—but that the point! The power of social influence to make an impact is huge, because people are more inclined to donate or do something for the social influencer.
To sum it all up, we do have impact by doing all those little things—but we must come together to produce a change, which is unfortunately not possible to some of the problems. Keep doing what you do, recycle, reducing electricity consumption, throwing all the trash into the trash bin but remember—be more mindful to what really matters. You do not need to stop using cars because it hurts the atmosphere, you do not have to stop flying because it increases carbon emissions. Sometimes, we have to accept some things really are impossible to solve, but there is still hope and many people are working on it, like better and cheaper solar panels, plant-based plastic, with many other more examples. You matter—but getting results are hard, choose wisely. Just keep contributing to the right people, but do not be pressured when you can’t consider environmental factors in, there is still much hope in many projects and new technology!
