Welcome to the Sustainable Behavior Challenge!

What prevents us from acting sustainably?  How can we promote more sustainable behavior in ourselves and in our communities? Does individual environmental behavior matter “in the big picture”?

The rest of the semester we will all be examining these  questions through an experiential class project aptly named The Sustainable Behavior Challenge. Each of us  (Prof. Brummel included!) will select one existing behavior they’d like to change to a more sustainable alternative and keep a blog about the process. Whether you’d like to cut out plastic water bottles, stop driving to the gym, reduce the amount of meat in your diet, or reduce your water usage, in this assignment you’ll experiment with sustainable behavior change and reflect on the process along the way.

Here’s how this will work: you’ll have several specific assignments and tasks related to The Sustainable Behavior Challenge throughout the rest of the semester. Prof. Brummel will assign a written blog assignment to accompany each of these tasks. Your final blog entry will be due during finals week.

The goal of this project is for each of us to examine and apply theories of sustainable behavior change using ourselves as individual experiments. You’ll reflect on what is challenging about changing one’s behavior, what motivates us, and ultimately what this all means for environmental quality.

So go forth and behave sustainably!