"Eat Your Vegetables" might prevent us from fixing Environmental Issues

Show me a young child that loves to eat vegetables and I'll show you a kid that had his Wii taken away one too many times. That familiar parental request of "eat your vegetables" is burned into our brains. And while our parents were trying to encourage us to eat healthy, I fear that it may become a major barrier to America getting on the right track towards sustainability.

Here's where I'm going with this. As highlighted in this recent locavore article in Forbes, and this three tips for a greener you article, moving more people to a vegetarian lifestyle would led to far less usage of land and water to raise cattle.

But if you're in your late 20s, 30s or 40s, do you really want to give up meat? Do you want to give up backyard BBQs or Tailgating? My initial response is "No!" Not because I don't want to do my part, but because I can't fathom a diet of entirely vegetables. If we dig into this a little more, that type of logic doesn't really make sense. There are plenty of ways to make meat-tasting products out of soy beans. And the variety of vegetables (or pasta) is at least as varied as there are choices for meat. So why the harsh initial reaction? I think it goes back to the "stigma" that parents place on vegetables. They aren't considered fun foods. They aren't considered foods that you choose to eat.

So while this is an excellent concept, and one that thousands or millions of people could endorse, it requires a cultural change here in the US. They already have that diet and lifestyle in many parts of the world (including China and India), but not here in the United States.

Lucky for me I'm going to be forced into that diet due to terrible genetics and a cholestoral levels that would make most bowlers jealous (if it were their average score). So now we just need to add this to the list of things to make simple for people to understand.

The list keeps getting longer...

# of Planets needed to sustain Western Culture

As I mentioned before, one of my key goals for this blog is to find a way to communicate the scope of the challenge in a very simple way. In a way that average people can rally around, or feel compelled to engage with.

This article shows an interesting way of communicating how much impact the United States has on the global sustainability challenge.

As the article highlights, "It is simply impossible for everyone on the planet to live as Westerners do today. We would indeed need three planets to do so. We still only have one."

This is a troubling statement, not just based on existing Western lifestyles (which many of us enjoy), but based on the growth of Asian societies that are frequently trying to emulate Western culture.

One Bottle of Water at a Time

Unless you're at an airport or fancy restaurant, a bottle of water typically costs around $1 (give or take). Spending $1 or saving $1 doesn't typically make people think too much about the consequences, but we all love to save $1 when it's easy. That's the whole premise behind why I started this blog, to help people understand that there are easy ways to save $1 (or many iterations of $1) by doing simple things that also happen to help move the cause of sustainability forward.

So my ultimate metric to determine if I make any progress on this idea will be the level of simplicity with which I'm able to explain that concept. Will it make sense to an adult? To a teenage? To my youngest child, in the same way that they understood how to use my iPhone within the first 5 minutes of seeing it?

My good friend Gregg Lewis, award-winning environmental architect, recently sent me this article and hoped it might be help explain to readers why this is such a difficult topic to understand. My response to him was this:

"Interesting article. This is exactly why I tend to believe that the really big thinking should be reserved for the 0.001% of people capable of thinking that big. These would be the people that were able to actually do the math to put a man on the moon in 1969. For the other 99.999% of us, we need a way to be inspired to just do something that we didn't know we could be inspired to do the day before. That's where the simplification of concept comes in.

What you're doing is brilliant, and noteworthy and noble, and I admire the hell out of it. It'll save 100M gallons of water. I've come to the conclusion that my role in this is to figure out a way to inspire someone to save 1 bottle of water, or maybe 1 gallon. I think I might have the capacity to convince a regular person to do that. And if I can figure out a way to get that inspiration to spread just a little, then maybe I've done something worthwhile."

So my goal is to help make this simple, and actually show how ordinary people can save $1 (or many $1's) by doing something that will be good for them and lots of other people.

An Introduction - Trying to Simplify the Problem

Like most people, I've heard the discussions from both sides about issues like Global Warming, "Green" Energy and Sustainability. Intelligent people from all sides (scientists, business leaders, politicians, etc.) make great points about why their view on these issues is right or the other side is wrong. But the more and more I listen to these people, the more that several thoughts continue to run through my mind:

• Most people (individuals) can't comprehend problems of this magnitude, so how do you expect them to act?
• Most people don't think in those timelines (2020, 2050), so how do you expect them to want to get engaged?
• Most conversations seem to focus on "save the environment" vs. "it's costs too much money", as if it's always a binary decision. Many of these discussions could be win-win if positioned properly.
• Nobody seems to have found the right community rallying point. such as Kennedy's "Man on the Moon" speech, or Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong yellow wristbands. "Green" needs that simple yet powerful rallying point.

So the purpose of this blog is to explore ways that allow people to want to not only get involved in creating more sustainable solution, but also to show them how it can benefit them and their families.