Thebeats.org sampled the attitudes of a group of about 50 people, mostly professionals, to find out their willingness to helping the environment. The outcomes were fascinating, in some respects very encouraging and in others, point to a lot more work being required by organisations like thebeats.org to provide awareness and encouragement to reach a tipping point overall.
Our first set of questions tested the willingness of the group to support the environment, giving options ranging from ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘I have no time’.
The results were as follows:
The pleasing thing about these results is that all we have to do is make a third of folk aware of an action and we potentially can have them put time and effort into helping the environment for our flora and fauna. We have some work to do to ensure the ask or action is as simple as possible and if it is convenient the percentage shoots way past the tipping point to 98%!
The challenge for thebeats.org is that not all actions required of us are convenient. So what is required to move people from willing to help ‘if convenient’ to willing to help ‘even if inconvenient’? The answer requires more research, but we know that there is a carrot and a stick.
The carrot is the actions we take can make positive change and many examples are around us. For example, we don’t see those plastic straws as much on our beaches as we did before awareness of their dangers were exposed. In addition, more and more retail and convenience outlets are being pressured to not supply plastic straws. This directly helps our sea life. Less of those terrible pictures of turtles with straws up their noses can be attributed to Australia.
The stick is seeing, hearing and experiencing the effects of not taking action. Hotter days, pollution, illness, droughts, fires, floods, the list of threatened and endangered species growing longer and our way of life being threatened.
So where do you stand? At what point will you take action, even if it is inconvenient?
In the next newsletter we will explore the most popular actions people are taking and some of the reasons why.