A Global Habit
What the conservation movement can learn from science of habit-forming and the four obstacles that stand in its way.
You are the product of your choices and the world is the sum of all of our habits. The world we live in is built on decisions.
So you decide you want to be a morning person, or you’re sitting on the couch watching James Bond and think, “man I need to get in shape.” You put the potato chips down and start cranking out push ups while Bond defeats the next villain, thinking “I’m going to do this. Tomorrow I’m going to get up early and go for a run.”
And maybe you do, maybe you even do it two days in a row, but before long the chances are you start to taper off (80% of us fail to maintain our New Year’s Resolution). Bond disappears from the TV screen and your motivation goes with him allowing old habits and easy fixes to slink back into place.
This inability to build desirable habits is all to common for a pretty simple reason:
- Good habits require upfront costs and delayed rewards
- Bad habits provide immediate rewards and delayed costs
(Watch this recorded podcast for a deeper dive into the specifics of habit forming)
We are biased towards fulfilling our present wants and needs, also known as present biased, making it far more likely that we will seek out immediate, instead of delayed rewards.
Being a former biologist I can’t help comparing everything I hear to conservation and the environment, and when I heard the above summary on the difficulties of creating good habits I felt like it summed up the trouble with the conservation movement.
From a habit-forming perspective, conservation thinking and action is an extremely difficult set of good habits to put in motion for many different reasons, but here are the problems I see most clearly:
- Abstraction — Rewards are often hard to grasp or appreciate
- Habit Overload — Many different habits fall under one umbrella
- Decision Fatigue — Too many alternatives to sift through
- Cultural Habits — Needs to be a collective effort
Abstraction
We’re a physical, tactile species. We like to be able to see and feel the fruits of our labor, like a clean house after vacuuming, checks on our to-do list, or even just a good feeling after a run.
With conservation the benefits are not typically visible or felt in the ways we like our pay-offs to be. They speak to abstract concepts for most of us like air and water quality, climate stability, mental health, and biodiversity; things we often find hard to appreciate.
Being so disconnected from the results makes it extremely difficult to enact and reinforce in our everyday lives. Especially when the alternative is so much more convenient to pursue.
In my opinion, the way to make abstractions more tangible is to adjust how we value them. Some people are fully capable of valuing nature and the foundation it provides to make all life possible, but others aren’t, and if you ask me, that likely comes down to the stories we inherit and absorb and what they tell us is important or valuable in life.
Habit Overload
Environmentalism is the ultimate in habit building overload. Develop this habit around recycling then this one around energy usage; learn to look for these ingredients, or these certifications in the products you consume; view the natural world in this light rather than that one, etc. It’s difficult enough to tackle one habit, never mind twenty.
Decision Fatigue
One of the most important aspects to creating a habit is being clear on what you need to do. Conservation is a lens through which we can view the world and the decisions that we have to make on a daily basis. The problem with that comes when we have too many decisions to make in the day. When we have too many alternatives to what’s good for the planet, or the right decision isn’t clear and requires research to figure out, we’re much more likely to revert to old, convenient ways of thinking and acting.
Cultural Habits
Finally, not only do we need to figure out how to get individuals to adopt a ton of different habits that have often abstract, intangible outcomes, while changing the economic engine of the world so that the right choice for the planet is every choice, it’s also a collective habit the world needs to form; making it the pinnacle of the habit forming pursuit.
Cultural habits and tendencies have a lot of power to affect people’s choices.
We need to take the cultural habit to a global one.
Develop a way of thinking and viewing the resources and world around us that seeks to sustain life, not diminish it for our immediate benefit, because every benefit comes at a cost.
As I said at the beginning, bad habits bring about immediate rewards and delayed costs, but with nearly 8 billion of us on the planet now, the cost is no longer down the road, it’s right in front of us. Each and every decision we make is having an immediate impact on the world around us.
The world is the product of all our habits combined. Let’s learn to develop new ones that benefit both ourselves and the planet, because make no doubt about it, this is a global problem fought on an individual level.
This is not an exhaustive list, there are undoubtedly many more problems that keep us from doing what is right for the planet and therefore our own health and well-being, but I would love to hear your thoughts on what some other sticking points might be.
