You walk through a dirty street in New York city and pull out a piece of gum. You take it out of the wrapper and what do you do? It's pretty likely that a majority of people will throw the trash to the ground. Change the situation and you are hiking through a beautiful trail, and have the same situation. Chances are you probably would do different things in each situation.
There's something about our environment that deeply affects us. It affects our policies too. Why do states like Vermont and California care so much about the environment? In the most basic sense, it's easy to protect something beautiful.
There's a deep connection between aesthetics and sustainability. Whether we realize it or not aesthetics affects us more than we think. Even a majority of philosophic thought believes that we need beauty. Specifically transcendentalism believes that we need to have truth, unity, AND beauty for a just society. In this theory we can't live without beauty just as much as we can't live without the truth. Honorable Business by James Ottesen explains how these are used in business and is a great read if you would like to learn more about the topic.
To skip the 250 pages, if we step back and think about our own bedroom and relate it to the environment it's easy to see why beauty is so important. When you first clean your room, it's easy to keep it clean. You're more likely to put things away right away and stop leaving things around. You feel happier, even relieved that you can go to bed in a clean room where organization is once again in place. You very well know that this typically doesn't last forever. Once your night stand starts to clutter or some other small pile starts to form, chaos ensues. You end up downfalling from your previously pristine room and you wait and wait until it's so bad that you need to clean it again. Then the cycle continues. This is the same for our environment. We do a clean up, reforms, and retweet our hearts out. Yet shortly after, we slip into our old ways and forget. That is, until the next big news article- Fairlife, Save the Oceans, Save the Turtles, etc. Then the cycle continues again.
So how do we extend this cycle and let it remain on the up and up? We hold onto the beauty, and we learn the importance of it. States with beautiful landscapes are the ones who aim to keep it that way. Yes, they do also gain a kickback from these efforts because increased tourism because of the landscapes, but they also have a deeper understanding to why aesthetics are needed. Their residents are happier, they create more creative businesses. They drive even more tourism and all parties end up benefitting.
The importance of beauty has been proven in the workplace in many different studies. What's any different about our environment? We need to work on making our environment something we care about, something that brings us joy even if its just in our own back yard or tiny apartment.
Start by small efforts, bring greenery into your dorm, start a campus beautification effort. These little things will make you more aware of your environment and appreciate it more. You will want to make changes to ensure that the environment not only stays the way it is but actually gets better.
So start with the little things that will actually last and stick to them. Work on learning about composting (blog coming soon), start buying products with less packaging, and boycott companies that are wreaking havoc on the environment (I'm talking to you fast fashion brands). At the end of the day what would you rather see- lush mountains or rising hills of trash?
留言