by Robert McClure in Dateline Earth/InvestigateWEST | February 8, 2010
I’ve always been just a hair skeptical about all those admonitions to consumers to save the world — you know, the “Live simply, that others may simply live”-type instructions. They felt a little too much like guilt-tripping to me, with perhaps not enough corresponding actual environmental good being done. It seems like a way for consumers who are feeling guilty about something — say, those SUVs they drive — to assuage their guilt by doing something that doesn’t really hurt, like turning off the lights when leaving a room. And of course, we’ve seen how this mindset can backfire:
What? You want me to do something more to help the environment? I recycle, ya know!
So environmentally, my frame of mind was: No pain, no gain.