No Impact Man: The Cultural Barriers to Environmental Change

Colin Beaven, a.k.a. No Impact Man, pondered the social obstacles to environmental change on Monday, wondering why so many of his neighbors were so averse to seeing bicycles on his block. A woman who lives nearby threatened to have police remove one of his rickshaws from the sidewalk where he parks it, saying it makes the street look untidy and implying that the sight of it brings down the neighborhood market.

From No Impact Man:

And the thing is, the way that bikes are parked in New York City is kind of untidy. There is little dedicated space to park them so we New Yorkers lock bikes to lampposts and street signs and parking meters and scaffolds and railings and anything else we can find.

That’s cultural barrier number one: that the infrastructure does not exist to support change.

One of the biggest barriers to people turning to biking in NYC is the fear that their bikes will get stolen–nowhere safe to leave them. The good news is that new planning regulations will soon require every new building to provide indoor bike parking.

Colin noted that cars ugly up the streets more than bikes, and that a hundred bikes replacing a hundred cars would look far nicer. But, people have come to accept cars as a given, no matter how ugly they may be.

This is just one small example of how many social obstacles we will really have to overcome to push real environmental change. If people fight bicycles parked on the sidewalk, they’ll really get worked up about vegetable gardens in place of lawns, compost piles and other ‘unsightly’ things that are part of a green lifestyle.

Perhaps the biggest social obstacle is the fact that the mainstream public sees the green movement as an attempt to take things away from them.  You know, that idea that we environmentalists just want to ruin everyone’s fun, forcing them to give up things they see as God-given rights, like driving Hummers around their bourgeois suburban neighborhoods and running the A/C with the windows wide open. We’re just a bunch of grumpy, Chicken Little commies, aren’t we?

Link [No Impact Man]
Photo credit: Colin Beaven

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