[This is an excerpt from my graduation project thesis - Urban Food Ecology]
When it comes to making people take the environmentally safe choices, something has not been working out till now.
People are shown the possible ill effects and expected to change. in short , they are shown the climate hell and expected to be scared of it and make the better choice. They are never shown the other side of the story, the heaven side.
When asked to stop doing something, the first thing that we think is ‘if not this, then what?’ The ‘then what?’ part of the story is the climate heaven. It is all the things that our planet and our life could be if we made the right choices. This side of the story needs to be a clear happy picture for humans to trust you and make the change. If the heaven side of the story sounds dicey and unclear, then people would rather just keep doing what they are doing and face the unclear possibility of hell too.
On the other hand, we need to stop talking about the these problems all together. As Author and Sales expert Elmer Wheeler puts it, “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”. Simply put, the steak doesn’t sell as much as the sizzle does. The steak here being the problems we face, like climate change, environmental degradation, human disconnect. The sizzle being the quality of life, health, new found skills that we would gain when we switch to regenerative living.
Being environmentally friendly should not just be a choice that we are making to save the planet, rather, it needs to be a choice that we make to improve our overall quality of life, thus helping the planet thrive. The sizzle could be defined as the personal motive behind doing something.
When it comes to action for the environment and our broken relationship with it, those actions need to be something that one would really want to do rather than being forced to do. These actions need to move onto being a lifestyle choice that people make regularly for the greatest impact.