Examples of sustainability tactics based on extrinsic motivation that fail sustainability and drive unsustainability

Strategies and tactics based in convincing, cajoling, coercing, and seeking compliance that may sound nice, but step on the gas, thinking it’s the brake, wanting congratulations. That is, they exacerbate the problem.

Compare this list with tomorrow’s list of emotions that emerge from the Spodek Method about nature that, when acted on, lead to people doing more than they said they would, expressing gratitude, and being happy to share.

1. Meatless Mondays
2. “10 little things you can do for the environment”
3. “Think of the children”
4. Carbon taxes
5. Calling things “clean,” “green,” or “renewable” that aren’t
6. Government subsidies for “clean,” “green,” or “renewable” energies
7. Waiting to lower fossil fuel until after Increasing “clean,” “green,” or “renewable” energies
8. Suggesting buying more “clean,” “green,” or “renewable” things instead of less
9. Especially: suggesting buying more electric vehicles instead of reducing roads
10. Lecturing
11. “Do well by doing good”
12. Teach the children (but not adults)
13. Cap and trade programs
14. Greenwashing
15. Telling people to live by values you don’t live by
16. Ecotourism
17. Nearly all climate conferences
18. Chasing efficiency in unsustainable practices
19. Promoting technological fixes for social and emotional problems
20. Suggesting either we’ll collapse or we’ll save ourselves
21. Accusing anyone of not caring
22. Having faith that anyone else will solve the problem for you
23. Saying racism leads people to pollute or target other groups
24. Creating false dichotomies like individual action versus system change
25. Saying governments and corporations should act first
26. Saying BP tricked us to looking at personal action so not personally acting
27. Saying others pollute more to justify not acting
28. Associating population control with euthanasia, racism, eugenics, sexism, Nazism, the One Child Policy, or hating humanity
29. Suggesting that using less means returning to the Stone Age, giving up vaccines or anesthesia, seeing family less, thirty being old age, etc
30. Suggesting that if airplane fuel could be made from plants that flying is sustainable today
31. Saying we have to solve racism first
32. Saying because people are poor they can’t act or shouldn’t have to
33. Waiting
34. Saying “if we stop polluting before China and Russia then they’ll beat us in the markets or militarily” or “if we don’t keep polluting, they will, so what we do doesn’t matter”
35. Suggesting individual action doesn’t matter

I just wrote those items in ten or twenty minutes. I’ll add to the list as I come up with more.