We’re not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.
— Bill McKibben, “The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium” (via erikostrom)
But of course! On Tuesday Colin and I took a tour of the Maplewood Mall parking lot, where a massive project is underway to improve water quality and impact public education.
More about what we learned on the We Work Here blog.
When we think about changing internal states, we think about education and persuasion — i.e., we think about putting more information into the internal process, to make it come out correctly. But when we think about changing behavior, we remember that information alone is inert. This is a robust finding consistent over 40 years of social science: information alone does not motivate behavior. […] Remember, answering a poll is a way of asserting identity. Beliefs tend to be reverse engineered, as it were: People tend to construct an identity around what they (and their tribe) do. That suggests that they will only construct a different identity when they start doing different things.
— David Roberts (Grist) on why behavior change is so important. It should follow, then, that modeling behavior is more important than slapping a bumper sticker on your car. And making it easier for people to change or even just try a new behavior is more important than arguing the idea that you think is right. In other words: less talk, more rock.
