Building a Platform

The spring right after I turned seven I planted a tree. It was a small white pine, and I patted it into my great grandfather’s backyard with my own little hands. Since then I have watched the tree grow from the window of that little house. I remember feeling like I was connecting with something as I planted the tree. I was connecting with the tree, with nature, with my future. I knew, innately, that I was doing a good thing. And I wanted to do it again and again.

I don’t think that planting one tree will save the world. No more than I think that buying a sustainable dishwasher or riding a bike instead of a car will stop climate change. But I do not deny that it is important. If we cannot do the little things than why would we strive to do the big things? The problem is that the progress stops there. There is an invigorating feeling when you do something out of the norm to save the environment. The problem is that there is that feeling. Those activities are linked in our mind as abnormal, as something we can be proud of, rather than being inate and the norm. When something small, like planting a tree, is enough to satisfy someone ethically then they no longer have the ambition to take the actions that create true change.

However, as a child those small actions (which at that age were all I could really do) were magical to me. I knew that I was doing a good thing, and I wanted to do it over and over again. While I believe that we, as adults, need to perform these acts subconciously, we also have a resonsibility to teach children how to perform them. In this, I differ from the views of Micheal Maniates in his Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World? In which he questions the importance of such actions. I don’t believe that his daughter was learning the wrong values and practices through her favorite book The Berenstein Bears Don’t Pollute (pg 9). Rather, I believe he was teaching her that such practices are important and how to do them.

I don’t think that I was saving the world when my great grandfather showed me how to plant a tree, tend a garden, reuse materials and harvest while I was seven. I believe he taught me a set of life skills that in some ways embedded in who I am. We cannot believe these actions are “special” and that we deserve some kind of reward. We must perform them without thinking, and teach next generations how to do them subconsciously, and then we can find ourselves with the time and energy to make real change.