My Sustainability Community’s Effect on Me

Forming a community around my sustainability efforts has helped immensely. Knowing that there are other people helping out with the conservation of water has made me more conscious about not only meeting my goal of taking less and shorter showers but also of other ways for me to conserve water. Whether it be using cold water when doing laundry, brushing your teeth while showering, or buying a reusable water bottle. With all of these other perspectives on how to save water I may now be able to incorporate some of them into my life and further my efforts on living sustainably. If I can add all of these other habits into my life then I can say that I put in some extra effort into my personal sustainability challenge.

Looking through the reduced water group’s posts I have seen that we have all had some similar experiences. It seems like we have all come to a similar conclusion that even with us trying to conserve water, we use water so frequently throughout our daily lives that our efforts have made a very small and seemingly insignificant effect. With this being said I do still believe if everyone (not just our small community) made an effort to conserve water then we could see a significant impact. However, as we have seen in class it is very difficult to fully change people’s behaviors. Without being able to really see the effects of conservation people will always question and not fully engage in these behaviors. I think that one way to solve the attitude behavior gap would be to create large environmental “communities” out in the real world sort of like what we did for this class.  Just like in our reduced water use I think that realistically these groups could be successful and change the way that we use water today.

Tory Klatt