Prof. Steven Cohen Sees Two-Track Solution in Individual and Organizational Buy-In
Solving environmental woes is going to take a mass movement, says Columbia University Professor Steven Cohen, PhD, who has long stressed the importance of the one-two punch of individual consciousness and government/corporate action on environmental issues.
“If we're going to have sustainability, it's organizations, businesses, nonprofits, universities, schools, eventually households that have to act,” according to Cohen, who is former executive director, and now senior advisor, of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Although he was speaking these words in 2015 to an audience at the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, his views today haven’t changed.
“To some considerable degree, we have to translate these [sustainability] concepts into behaviors at the organizational level and at the individual level,” he added, noting that media messages and elementary school curricula can be enlisted in the effort.
In a recent interview with The Earth and I, Cohen was sanguine about the dawn of an unprecedented global environmental movement. It is a movement to ameliorate and eventually reverse environmental decline, and it is already here, albeit still in its growth stage, he says.
“A concern for environmental sustainability has entered our culture,” says Cohen, who has taught public management and environmental policy at Columbia since 1981.
“The environmental issue has gone from the fringes of our consciousness to the center.”
Evidence for this is everywhere, he says. “Young people are allowing it to impact their consumer choices and the organizations they are willing to work for. ... The environmental issue has gone from the fringes of our consciousness to the center.”
Sustainability Woes
Despite being a buzzword, sustainability is an often-hazy idea.
The UN’s Brundtland Commission, in its 1987 report “Our Common Future,” defined sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Today’s economic development, however, while effectively meeting the needs of the present in many well-off countries, is increasingly recognized as being unsustainable. In the words of the Commission, development today is “compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
[W]ithout individual and family-level buy-in, regulations imposed from the halls of government power can spark collective resistance and protests.
Cohen believes emphasis on households and individuals is important because without individual and family-level buy-in, regulations imposed from the halls of government can spark collective resistance and protests.
In terms of environmental vision, goals, and improvement, not only are individual and household levels important, but government leadership is essential.
Some environmental leaders push for systemic change. For instance, Berlin, Germany, Professor Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, has called for “a new industrial revolution” to combat environmental problems.
“Personal sacrifice alone cannot be the solution to tackling the climate crisis,” Levermann told The Guardian in 2019.
“[R}eaching zero emissions requires very fundamental changes. Individual sacrifice alone will not bring us to zero. It can be achieved only by real structural change, by a new industrial revolution. Looking for solutions to the climate crisis in individual responsibilities and actions risks obstructing this.”
In his comments to The Earth & I, Cohen noted that human beings are biological creatures who depend on having a healthy natural world from which to draw water, food, and air. “We don’t get that without functioning ecosystems,” he says.
With 8.3 billion people on Earth—which is growing to probably 9 or 10 billion—"we cannot go back to nature,” Cohen says. “There's too many of us, and there's not enough nature. But we have to figure out a way to live on this planet without destroying nature.”
[T]he vital question is, “how do we manage this high-throughput economy without destroying the planet?”
So, the vital question is, “how do we manage this high-throughput economy without destroying the planet?”
The Need for More Education
To aid the environment, Cohen told his audience at the Ross School, “We have to learn a lot more about the planet.”
“[At Columbia’s] Earth Institute,” he continued, “we have environmental scientists from all over the world, all over America, trying to understand the basics of what the impact of human behavior on ecology is—what is happening to our ecosystems.
“You would think we know a lot about it,” Cohen says. “We know a lot more than we did 20, 30, 40 years ago, but our ignorance is still fairly profound. We need to learn a lot more than we know.”
But even without perfect environmental knowledge, there are clearly things individual citizens can be educated and incentivized to do to promote the health of the planet’s water, air, and earth. Among them:
Avoiding excessive use of fossil fuels by, for example, biking to work (see: Electric Bikes: Revolutionizing Personal Transportation).
Using energy-efficient appliances and light fixtures at home and in the office (see: Deep Energy Retrofit—Total Residential Makeover Raises Energy Efficiency).
Adding solar panels to home, apartment building, and/or office building (see: ‘Balcony Solar’: Harnessing Power from Sunlit Spaces).
Saving table scraps and adding them to a backyard or community compost heap (see: Stopping the Food Waste—An Introduction to Composting).
Recycling batteries and electronic devices and accessories at one’s local waste facility (see: Recycling Gives Lithium-Ion Batteries a ‘Second Chance’).
Participating in a cleanup of a street, neighborhood, or local park—increasing one’s number of friends as a bonus in the process (see: Japan’s Kamikatsu: A Model of Zero-Waste Living).
Saving water, an increasingly scarce commodity in many areas (see: When the Water Dries Up).
These and other kinds of individual, community, and industrial actions around the world inspire hope for the future.
A few years ago, Cohen wrote in a Columbia University newsletter, called “State of the Planet,” that, for individuals to be incentivized to become creators of eco-beneficial change, their thought processes and values need to be respectfully addressed so they can decide on their own to take responsibility to shift their behavior.
“Individual change and collective system-level change are interconnected,” he wrote.
Moreover, he told The Earth & I, “People who have grown up on a warming, crowded, polluted planet know they must change the way we produce and consume.”
*Robert R. Selle is a freelance writer and editor based in Bowie, Maryland.
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