maybe walmart isn't so bad?

I have never been a fan of Walmart and try to avoid it as much as possible. My mother is proud to say that she has never entered one. It is just too big, an overwhelming super power. It always buys in bulk and sells as cheap as possible and blah blah blah, BUT things may be looking up in the sustainable consumption department. Check it out:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/the-great-grocery-smackdown/7904/
They have so much power that it might actually work! Maybe one day my mom won't go anywhere except for Walmart....maybe not, but the point is that maybe mainstream will work after all.

An interesting psychological observation

     After reading so much on human behavior and ways of changing it to move towards sustainability, I have become very observant of people, including me, and behavior in general. I came across a very interesting incident in my own home, that is very applicable to this topic. My housemates and I recently received a water bill, something which we do not have in the US, and since 3 out of 4 of us are Americans, we were a bit angry. As we looked through where the fees came from we were very frustrated to learn that we get charged for water coming in to our house and then again when it leaves, as well as rain water. All being students with out much money, we would prefer not to pay, and so we made some alterations to our lifestyle that will require less water, so that our bill would be less. Now the part that is interesting to me is that after this little event, one of my housemates, struggling for money, still leaves all of the lights on, and keeps the heat on high (and its not even winter yet...). I am constantly turning the lights off after him. I am hoping that when our electricity and gas bills come, he will want to make several more alterations. It just astounds me that the connection with electricity and gas has not yet been made in his head; he is a very bright person.
     In this situation educating the consumer probably wouldn't make a difference, the consumer needs the punishment of the bill to convince him to use less energy everyday. This is where things get scary. So many people aren't going to do anything about this problem until they can see with their own eyes that it is going to directly affect them, and it is going to happen soon. In this specific example it happens to be money, but there are plenty of people out there with so much money that they don't care, and unfortunately those people tend to have the biggest carbon footprints. It seems as though those people must be persuaded by force, but because they have so much money, in our current economic system, they also have a lot of power. So what do we do?
     From all that I have learned thus far it seems as though we are going to have to put together all sorts of different tactics to get the message across to all kinds of people. Different people create different size impacts in different ways. There is not one single way in which we can change their lifestyles, even just in terms of direct energy consumption. We need people to see what is going on, the average person doesn't want to read about or listen to some complex scientific information. We need them to see what life is going to look like if they don't shape up now. That 10-10-10 advertisement with people blowing up took it a bit too far in my opinion, but we need to grab peoples attention just long enough to convince them that plenty of horrible things are already happening right outside of their door, not just to the polar bears and penguins on the poles, and the monkeys in the rainforests.

I walked out of class today still thinking about what a few people were discussing- implementing a policy so that the minimum wage was enough to live on, and only allowing people to work a certain amount of hours a week. That sounds fine and dandy at first but that is how people lose ambition and motivation as someone argued. I totally agree. All that I could think about was The Giver.  The idea of this New Economy sounded fantastic to me when I first learned about it, but now I'm not so sure. The community in The Giver originally sounds perfect too, but as the book goes on, I for one come to realize that I do not want to live in a society like that. I am the kind of person that works hard to get what at least I think I deserve, and in doing so I come across a lot of people that are lazy. I would be incredibly frustrated if lazy people got the same compensation as I did for doing nothing. Obviously if the New Economy became life, society would not be just like it is in The Giver; presumably there would still be diversity (hopefully) and everyone would be capable of knowing what was going on in other places. I think what has happened is that I have immersed myself with a lot of readings regarding this New Economy and the idea has gone from an idealistic hippie smiles-all-around dream in my head to a socialist nightmare. Perhaps because I am from the USA some of the things that people said seemed awfully socialistic to me, so maybe if we want to make this conversion it has to be done very slowly. If I am correct in thinking that the new economy might result in socialism, I would like to simply say that I don't think that it will work, at least not in the USA.  I am now realizing that this is a bit of a tangent, but that is all I have for now. 

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