Do my actions really make a difference?

That's a common question in the debate over protecting the environment and stopping global warming. The refrain we hear is yes, everyone's actions make a difference. Drive less. Take shorter showers. Use reusable bags. Recycle. These are the actions I've discussed in my blog as I've chronicled my attempts to "do my part." They're the changes that while small and fairly easy, make me feel good that I'm making things better. Today after taking a quick shower, I took the train to work. I ate lunch, pulling a cooked chicken sausage out of a reused Ziploc bag. I bought a can of Sprite and meant to recycle it (oops, I left it behind but I have faith that someone else recycled it instead of throwing it away), and then I took the train home at the end of the day.

Then tonight I read an interesting article on alternet.org, a website featuring stories with alternative and progressive viewpoints that don't get covered in the mainstream press. The article, "Taking Shorter Showers Doesn't Cut It: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change," written by Derrick Jensen, an environmental activist, and originally published in Orion Magazine, had some sobering statistics about how our individual actions make little difference in the grand scheme of things. As the headline suggests, taking shorter showers won't save our water supply because 90 percent of water use is by agriculture. I thought a valid criticism was that An Inconvenient Truth focuses only on the solutions individuals can take to stop global warming. This statistic summed up Jensen's argument well: "Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide."

The writer didn't intend to leave us feeling hopeless, he wants to wake us to the reality that we need to change our society and not just our individual habits. So tonight will I leave my computer turned on because it doesn't make a difference? No. But at the same time I can feel less guilty about the bath I want to take.

I'm not sure what to take away from this. I feel good about the changes I've made to my lifestyle because it's better than doing nothing but I'm not working toward larger, community-wide changes. I think cities (or even better, the state and country) should require businesses to charge customers for plastic bags, which would get more people using reusable bags, but I'm not writing letters or attending city council meetings or joining activist groups to fight for it. It's easier to be responsible for just myself and blog once a week about my latest small victory or stumble. In the short term, it's refreshing to know I don't have to carry the burden of the world on my shoulders. But in the long term, am I going to make a bigger commitment? It's something for all of us to think about.