GREEN MOTIVATION 

What motivates people to make new choices? How can you encourage people to commit to being consistent in making choices that you believe will contribute to creating a safer, healthier, more enriching human experience for everyone? These are the questions that I want to address, which is providing a way for me to contribute to the green movement possible ideas I have to coat their message with more compassion and consideration to inspire more communal concern and increase their effectiveness in saving our mysterious planet that miraculously has been able to sustain life.

 How have humans been able to influence the free will and choice of other humans?  Well for starters, I think they focused on external motivation, rather than internal motivation. Within the paradigm of external motivation, we make choices out of fear based on how outside forces will view us and evaluate us. From this perspective our actions must be defined as either good or bad, something we should do or should not do, and labeled as right or wrong.  Humans often modify their choices in order to be accepted and labeled as good and right because they did what they should.  

 So why do I choose to put my aluminum can in my bag and hold on to it until I find a place to recycle it, instead of enjoying some convenience and throwing it away in the trash that is directly in front of me, purely to do the “right” thing? I prioritize resourcefulness over convenience to be a “good green girl”? Hmm… I have. Although I now know that I feel the most alive, the most inspired, driven, and motivated when I decide to be the version of Maria who lives out consideration, care, and compassion for our shared home, planet Earth and holds on to that can. These values along with many others, like community and equality, are the core of my life and they guide me to make choices that allow me to experience them.  

I learned in my childhood that an aluminum can in a trash can was like throwing away money. My family taught me that you could collect them and take them to a place that would give you money for them. That is what originally motivated me to recycle aluminum and glass back in the 80s. At that time I don’t think I could wrap my head around how many people lived in the world, or how all their trash adds up and takes up space and could take away healthy land for new generations. I doubt I knew what the term landfill even meant. For this reason, I will forever remain grateful for the first environmentalist friend I made in high school. She, among many other things, started the recycling program at our high school. It was not because she got 5 cents a can. I think she was motivated by her concern about growing landfills and wanted to reuse a re-source by recycling it to serve another purpose for people. I was hooked, she shared a lot of what she had gained following her passion to love our planet and my motivation to recycle was exponentiated through our friendship.

And then I wondered why doesn’t everyone recycle. Don’t they care? Don’t they know it’s what they should do and that it’s wrong and hurtful to the environment to not recycle?

What I do know now, after many years of life experience is that all the time I spent with  “should” energy, sorting out my college roommates’ cans and bottles and telling them they should recycle… or telling myself I should get all my plastic caps and bags that my recycling program doesn’t take to a place that will… or how I should be better at combining trips… or I should always refuse Styrofoam… or I should know more about global warming… hasn’t been effective or encouraging to myself or anyone I have “shoulded”. 

When you make a choice it’s a declaration of who you choose to be. I choose to be someone who lives out their concern for the planet with compassion and action. I also choose to remember our hectic lives and need for convenience and I don’t believe this need will decrease with condemnation.  I choose to try and inspire a love of the Earth that will naturally inspire a genuine desire to help the Earth. I choose to do what I can re-awaken in people their potential for primal power, raw resourcefulness, and ingenious innovation. I choose to remind us of the joy, fulfillment, belonging, and pride we can experience when we gather in community, share our unique contributions, and become kindred survivors during a trying time.  I choose to remember that there will be times when my actions/words do not reflect this intention and I can choose to accept myself for being a fumbly human full of follies.  Then I can choose to re-remember who I really am and take the next moment to re-create that vision of myself. And I’ll hope that my choices will be genuinely inspiring to my fellow humans.

What I also find sad about the right/wrong external motivating way of living is how we attach labels to others’ actions and then apply those labels to the people themselves.  We take an action (for example when we see a can be thrown into the trash) and put it through our evaluator (our brain), which has a vast pool of descriptive labels which we attach to the action, such as inconsiderate, or lazy. These words are then also used to craft an enemy image of the person performing the action. You threw a can away, so you are inconsiderate and lazy and you are not on the green team with me!! You are an enemy!!  Whoa, what just happened!?! Who would want to be on that team? A team that judges and labels people, and calls them names? Are we still in grade school? 

Our actions do not define us as people and if we want to inspire each other to change an action, showing consideration for how overwhelming letting go of life-long habits can be could go a long way in really reaching people. My hope is that we leave the labels behind and offer them the space to show up in a new light.  For all of us who have decided to be stewards of our planet, for all the trailblazers to this movement who have probably felt very alone for a long time trying to get attention for the awareness they’ve uncovered, I hope you have felt in your heart the joy and amazement of loving the Earth and that you know that She appreciates and acknowledges your energy and effort and loves you!

Wanna be green with me?!?!  Willing to give generously of your love and live gratefully for your home??