Question

3. How can we bring about environmental change by a) coming together as citizens, and b) acting as individual consumers? After explaining how environmental movements seek to effect various types of environmental change, discuss what changes we can make as individual consumers to improve the health of our planet. Support your answer with specific and explicit.

Answer 1

Answer 3.

In the recent time, there has been an incrase in the social debate on the need for environment ethics within the larger domain of consumer markets. The high environmental costs and risks associated with certain perishable and non renewable resources has created an urgent need for reformations of the economic policies and limiting the consumption of potentially hazardous commodities. However, a large pool of resources that are still extensively available and popularly used because of their cost effectiveness or usefulness, are increasing the level of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide emissions in the air leading to a rise in global warming and climate change. Thus, an alternative and a more grassroots solution to the issue of climate change than the failing government policies is to create public awareness among the masses towards ethical consumer behaviour.

One key way to engage in a wide range of pro-environmental practices both at the collective and individual levels is to address the distinct environmental problems and major, global challenges such as climate change under the notion of ‘citizen–consumers’. Under this conceptual category, members of the society are positioned in terms of their individual ecological responsibilities alongside consumer choice in determining the pros and cons of a particular commodity and service. Thus, ethical decision-making and limiting consumption of vital and scarce resources such as clean water, gas and petroleum, etc have become crucial techniques for addressing environmental change at individual and collective levels.

There is an ever growing range of individual and community based programs designed to assist citizens and the community at a personal and household level to reduce their carbon footprints. For instance, campaigns such as WWF’s Earth Hour campaign works through a community engagement to influence climate change action by encouraging the citizens to comply to a small commitment of turning off lights for one hour on one day of the year.

Individual consumer change strategies use simple and painless steps such as towards lower carbon-intensive lifestyles, through practices like turning off household lights and purchasing energy saving appliances, doing carpool to travel to work, school, etc. such an approach holds that small steps add up whereby the actions will lead to more meaningful and extensive behaviour change,