What do YOU CARE ABOUT when you ‘care about the environment’?

Every person that I talk to gives me a different answer.

“I care about endangered polar bears”
“I care about future generations”
“I care about developing countries”
“I care about trees”
“I just hate oil companies”

This sounds like a whole heck of things that covers just about everything. In my mind, the term ‘caring about the environment’ has lost its significance.


This is MY biggest motivation:

People in developing countries are feeling the effects of our actions right now:

1. Warmer climates aggravate the tropical diseases such as malaria, dengue, trypanosomiasis, yellow fever, hookworms, sleeping sickness, and schistosomiasis.

2. Warmer climates increase the likelihood of natural disasters. Particularly, harvest failures result from droughts as farmers cannot grow their food, and from floods which wash all their crops away.

3. Carbon in the atmosphere results in longer harvesting period for us, but shorter for them.

4. Depletion of the ozone layer increases exposure to ultraviolet radiation which increases skin cancers, particularly the highly dangerous form, melanoma. This is predominantly significant in the Southern hemisphere.


What is YOUR biggest motivation?

“In 1968 Phillip Goldberg asked university women to judge the merits of several scientific articles that were attributed to a male author (“John McKay”) or to a female author (“Joan McKay”). Although these manuscripts were identical in every other respect, participants judged the articles written by the male to be of higher quality than those written by the female.

These young women were reflecting a belief, common to people in many societies, that girls and women lack the potential to excel in either math and science courses or in occupations that require this training (Eccles et al., 2000; Tennenbaum & Leaper, 2002). Kindergarten and grade 1 girls already believe that they are not as good as boys in arithmetic, and throughout the elementary school years, children increasingly come to regard reading, art, and music as girls’ domains and mathematics, athletics, and mechanical subjects as boys’ domains (Eccles, Jacobs, & Harold, 1990; Eccles et al., 1993; Eccles, Freeman-Doan, Jacobs, & Yoon, 2000; Entwisle & Baker, 1983).”

Source: Developmental Psychology Childhood and Adolescence 3rd ed. Author: SHAFFER