Everyone Can Be An Environmentalist

It’s time to take a sledgehammer to the walls around environmentalism. The future of our Earth is at stake.

When it comes to improving the environment, we often get stuck on individual choices and lifestyles. It can seem like a useful yardstick: Are you doing X, Y, and Z to avert planetary disaster? Focusing on our own individual choices feels productive, fun, and ego-boosting. I brought a reusable bag — call me Greta Thunberg!

It’s great to celebrate wins and push ourselves to be our personal best. And the planet can certainly use all the help it can get. But on the flip side, a hyper-focus on individual choices can be exclusionary and short-sighted, making us point the finger at each other, isolate ourselves into smaller and smaller niche groups of like-minded people, and lose focus on the shadowy forces really in the driver’s seat on our linear global economy that takes, makes, and wastes, destroying lives, lands, and ecosystems in the process.

Once we’ve made a few eco-conscious choices ourselves, it’s easy to start assigning blame and judgement toward others who we don’t see making the same exact efforts. Have you ever secretly (or not-so-secretly) judged someone for using a plastic straw, eating a hamburger, or driving a truck? By doing so, we inadvertently build tall walls around the elite “club” of environmentalism—you have to be THIS eco-friendly, in THESE specific ways, to get in. For the planet to survive and thrive, we can’t have any walls around the practice of treating it better. It needs to be a big, open party that everyone’s invited to and looks super fun.

By the way, the bad guys and corporations who are profiting from environmental destruction love when we fight with each other over straws or hamburgers, or unfriend people because they vote a different way. They know what we often forget: That we’re stronger together. As environmentalist Sami Grover writes, “It might be time to stop fighting with each other because we’re making unsustainable choices in a system where true sustainability is impossibly hard, and instead start grappling with the structural and systemic influences that put us in that position in the first place.”

As a recovering perfectionist, I now know that no one is perfect. Most of us are far from it, and that’s just fine. Rather than a handful of humans adopting a lifestyle that allows them to never consume resources or impact the life of any other living being—which sounds pretty impossible anyway—we should instead aim for every person, from every background and walk of life, to simply do their best. Whatever that looks like.

If you’re a straw-sucking, hamburger-eating, truck-driving person who still cares about the planet and what we’re leaving to future generations, you may not be welcome in every environmental circle, but I hope you feel at home in mine. And if you’re someone who is already checking all the boxes on the list of things to do to avert planetary disaster, you’re welcome too—we can learn a lot from you! But no judging. This is an inclusive judgement-free zone where we practice kindness, celebrate diversity in all its expressions, lead by humble example, and prize progress over perfection always.

Whatever you’re already doing for the planet, thank you. Instead of stopping there, let’s use our personal choices to fuel bigger steps that make a world-changing difference.

Join our community by subscribing to our newsletter, following @GwinnettRecycles on Facebook and Instagram, and being part of our Facebook group, Zero Waste Gwinnett. For more reading on personal responsibility when it comes to the environment, check out this thought-provoking article.

About Gwinnett Recycles: Gwinnett Recycles is focused on helping Gwinnett County, the second-largest county in the state of Georgia, reduce, reuse, compost, and recycle more material and keep waste out of landfills and the environment. Gwinnett Recycles is run 100% independently by citizen volunteers. To connect with us and support our efforts, follow us on Facebook and Instagram, subscribe to our newsletter, and consider volunteering with us!

About author Laura

Laura A. Hernandez is the founder of Gwinnett Recycles, a grassroots community organization focused on trash, and is a co-founder of Come Clean Gwinnett, a large Facebook-based community group that empowers citizens to reduce litter and blight. After serving for four years as a Mayor-appointed member of the Sustainable Norcross Commission, Laura went on to become the Chairwoman's appointee to the inaugural Gwinnett Sustainability Commission, which she led as chair. Laura hates to see anything go to waste and believes that Gwinnett County's more than one million residents can make a big impact by reducing, reusing, composting, and recycling right.