The Trinity of Despair

Before having the video conference with Prof. Maniates, I admit I was a bit skeptical about his ideas and his belief that individual action really doesn't account for that much. After all, that is what the "environmental" movement is all about in our country. When I read his articles for class, I thought that it just seemed almost as though he was against any type of individual action, but during the conference, he explained that individual action should be something as commonplace as personal hygiene. I still believe that individual action should be stressed, since in the collective, the action will start to actually matter. So I guess in this way, I am still a bit skeptical of his Environmental Strategy standpoint. I think that encouraging individual action is a good place to start getting people to think about environmental issues. By giving people some examples of things that they can do in their own lives, you are getting the ball rolling for more substantial change at a higher level. If people do not believe that changes on a grand scale will actually benefit the environment or themselves, they will most likely disagree with the changes.

Overall, I really liked the "trinity of despair" diagram. I think that the most important part to take from is the Social Change aspect, saying that we don't need 100% of people to be with us. I think that a lot of the time, we get too caught up with the climate skeptics, wondering how they can still be against the idea of climate change even when all of the science points to these anthropogenic causes. But as illustrated on the hand out, the number of people who believe in it/are worried about it far outweigh those who are in complete disbelief. I think that by keeping this fact in our minds, we can start to move away from the feeling of despair that we can't get anything done and instead focus on those that are with us. We have it by the numbers, so we just need to get going with it.

I think that all major social changes have to start somewhere. They have all begun at a grassroots level, convincing people on the street of what they can do to help the cause. It is time now, however, for us to start to move from the individual to the collective. By encouraging those who are with us to come together and ask those in charge to make real change, we might actually see something important happen soon. And as we all know, it needs to happen sooner rather than later.