Imagine walking down the street and you just finish your bottle of soda and you go to throw it out… but wait… there isn’t a garbage bin anywhere in sight. You contemplate throwing the bottle to the side because, come on, it’s just this one time. What is one bottle going to do? You’ll make sure you throw away the next thing I use, right?. But, the next time you do this, the same thing happens: “Come on, it’s just this once”.

What hurts, or helps, a society are the individual actions of each person. When you adopt the lazy attitude that makes you want to toss the bottle to the side of the road, you take part in the actions that create the damage in the environment. When you throw it, you think in a very isolated point of view, but neglect to think about how many others have done that same thing today. This ushers in questions like: “Well what do my actions matter when put against 20 others?”, or “How can I make a difference, I’m only one person?”. The individuals make up the community, and therefore the actions of each individual, like I said before, allow the issues to worsen or become better. So, yes, your actions really do matter. Regardless of whether or not there are other people who counteract you, the act of you throwing that bottle into the dirt does not change the fact that what you did adds to the problem. These are the same ideas that arise when people question if their vote matters.

Now obviously this is a topic that is philosophical and does not have a definitive “yes” or “no” regarding whether your actions matter, but I think this issue is what is holding back a lot of change, therefore discussing this topic is very important.

I think that if more people were to adopt this mindset, then there would be less of an issue regarding climate change today. Yea, the corporations make up a chunk of the pollution, but like I emphasized in my past post, the strongest impacts (the last 3 paragraphs) are created by the community. If the individuals in a city decide to toss that bottle on the ground, then within a day there will be 1000 more bottles on the streets. In each of these cases, each individual thought in the very narrow view. They made a decision because they believed “What’s one bottle gunna do?”, but failed to understand that, when that question is asked by every single person, that “one bottle” becomes thousands.

I think it is effective to see this issue as some sort of race, where, for example, throwing the bottle to the side equates to taking a step back, and recycling it equates to a step forward. Why, in any case, would you want to take a step back? Even if there are 20 people who litter, then why not recycle to try to at least gain back one of those steps. Thinking in the sense of the big picture, and not a narrow point of view centered around yourself, will do wonders in combating a lot of the issues what we currently have today.

It is a difficult process to try to get past the “My vote/action doesn’t matter” state of thought. It is hard to think that, in a sea of 300 million people, one person is able to make a difference. Thinking about it now, It is hard for me to completely grasp that. Going back to another analogy: If a group project has 10 people in it, and 2 decide to actively go against the groups goal, then not only do the other 8 people have to make up the work for those 2 people, but they have to combat the actions that were done to set the group back. I would say that this is a good way to look at the issue of individual actions like littering or using plastic bags. When you do something like throw a bottle on the ground, you not only hurt the environment, but you effectively counteract the actions of someone who decided to recycle their bottle.

As a little note to close: If you come across the question of “Do my actions matter” and decide, after thinking about how one person’s say can possibly make a difference in a group of 300 million, that it doesn’t matter, then there are several thousands of others who went through the same thing and reached the same conclusion. These numbers add up, and when 10,000 individuals decide that their actions do not matter, then it starts to show on the large scale.