Like most people, I am often frustrated by the horrible things we humans do to each other and the environment, and yet I can’t say I’ve done a lot to help any of these causes. After some thought, I have a few theories about this situation:
- Many of these things would never happen if most people, myself included, were paying closer attention.
- Most people, myself included, would pay closer attention if doing so was a rewarding experience, but efforts to learn more or small contributions are met with guilt trips about how much more could be done, until the individual feels powerless and gives up.
- People aren’t ignoring these problems because they’re uncaring. They maintain distance because they’re logical, and see the issue as a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts: individual contributions alone won’t fix the problem, and since you can’t count on everyone else to help, your own contribution may not be the best use of your time.
- Focusing on small gestures is a very powerful plan of attack, because if you have little to lose by helping, there’s no reason not to do it. By extension, there’s no reason for others not to do it as well. By reducing the overhead in your contribution, you reduce your personal risk of wasting time on a lost cause, and maximize the pool of people who are willing to participate. Suddenly, you have a mass of people who are invested in the problem, people who are customers and voters and whom many influential people have a vested interest in satisfying.
- Experts on these problems are fully entrenched in them, so it’s probably not all that reasonable to expect them to have a realistic sense of what the average person can take on. This will only work if we do it ourselves, looking to the experts for information, not direction.
The point of casualactivist.org is to focus on the simple changes—the little things that won’t interrupt your day to day life, but will be a little easier on the environment, your body, or someone you may have never met. Most of the topics on this site center on responsible consumerism, since those changes have minimal overhead in one’s everyday life but can go a long way toward building the world we’d all like to see.
The creation of this website was sparked by two discussions with some inspirational people in my life. The first was with my Aunt Anne, who stressed the importance of holding companies accountable for their business practices; the second, with my friend Autumn about slavery in the cocoa industry. How had I sheltered myself from these things? Have I been buying chocolate made from slave-harvested cocoa? Is it possible to buy chocolate from cocoa harvested under ethical conditions? Without going to a specialty shop three towns away?
After a little research, I had some answers (respectively: I didn’t want to know, yes, yes, and yes), but most of what I read made me really depressed. There’s an endless supply of media supporting the notion that you can’t make a difference if you don’t jump headfirst into the activism game. It almost worked on me a time or two, but I’m here because I don’t think it should be that way.
I have a lot going on in my life and I’m sure you do too. We can’t all be full-blown activists, and as much gratitude as I have for the people who do dedicate their lives to these causes, I don’t necessarily think it would be a good allocation of my specific aptitudes and energy to make a career out of being a good citizen. I don’t feel guilty about that, and I don’t think you should, either. Once we get all that out of the way, we can more freely look at what we can do.
Welcome to the site, and thank you for visiting!
