Policy-making may provide the most notable progress for sustainability issues, but according to the consultants at the Green Lunches panel hosted by the University of Idaho Sustainability Center April 24, people can make a significant impact through their daily use of dollars.
Philip Vukelich | Argonaut
City of Moscow Mayor Nancy Chaney moderates a panel discussion on the logic and motivation for choosing short-term economics over long-term sustainability Wednesday in the University of Idaho Commons Clearwater Room.
“Your biggest environmental impact, for most people, results from decisions you make about what you eat day to day,” said John Lawrence, business professor and Environmental Science Program faculty.
What people buy at grocery stores, he said, informs consumer behavior analysis that businesses use to determine what kinds of products to carry. These sorts of low-involvement purchases — purchases on which people don’t spend much time thinking or researching — extend to other businesses and products, such as clothing or building supply stores.
Lawrence said people can have any belief about sustainability they want, but businesses only see what people buy. It’s about consistency.
“Every time you take your wallet out and make a purchase, you’re telling businesses how to behave,” he said. “If everyone behaved consistently with their purchases to create changes, businesses would make those changes.”
It isn’t always clear how “green” a company’s practices and products are. Kevin Decker, research fellow with the UI Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship Program studying Palouse Prairie conservation, said one of the greatest annoyances for consumers is the difficulty of discerning which organization or product line to support.
Decker said the larger environmental costs involved in sustainability impact product prices. Environmentally rich areas such as the Palouse offer agriculture and other valuable resources collectively termed ecosystem services, he said. A business takes a toll on an ecosystem’s value when it deposits waste into a stream or burns polluting elements into the air, he said. These natural fees are shifted onto others when people and organizations fail to account for them, but he said the effort required to deal with them would increase prices from warehouses to store shelves.
“If all the actual costs were internalized by everyone, many products would cost a lot more money for consumers,” Decker said.
Traci Craig, UI environmental psychology professor, said people don’t have to limit their intentional impacts for sustainability to the stuff they take home. She said people usually make decisions about survival, food and the like from a sense of immediacy, and businesses would do well to find ways to make buyers want the sustainable products.
Sustainability-minded consumers, she said, should also find the companies whose efforts give back to the community in the form of employment, charity, use of local goods and other contributions.
One of the simplest ways to help make the world more sustainable, Lawrence said, is to say, “thank you.”
“You can reinforce your actions locally by letting your local businesses know why you use their services,” Lawrence said.
Matt Maw can be reached at [email protected]
