social change
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How personal actions can kick-start a sustainability revolution
Step it up! Small is the new big.The environmental movement is divided over the importance of small steps — are they a critical starting point or a distraction from needed policy and institutional changes? A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but will small changes add up to the kind of […]
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Would you trade a bigger house for more happiness?
In New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s column on Sunday, he recounts the story of then-14-year-old Hannah Salwen and her dad Kevin, and how a chance encounter with a homeless man catapulted their family into swapping their high-end home for a more modest abode and donating half of the proceeds to charity. Just reading that […]
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Never mind what people believe — how can we change what they do? A chat with Robert Cialdini
When it comes to energy, policymakers are often confronted with human behavior that seems irrational, unpredictable, or unmanageable. Advocates for energy efficiency in particular are plagued by the gap between what it would make sense for people to do and what they actually do. Efforts to change people’s behavior have a record that can charitably […]
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Three models of social change
Can we change fast enough? When thinking about the enormous need for social change as we attempt to move the world economy onto a sustainable path, I find it useful to look at various models of change. Three stand out. One is the catastrophic event model, which I call the Pearl Harbor model, where a […]