On Oct. 23, the Students of Sustainability launched its SOS challenge, a competition in which students take pictures of themselves being sustainable and tweet them to @SOSatSU for a chance to win gift cards to two local restaurants, Strong Hearts On The Hill and Café Kubal. This is an engaging way to encourage people to think about sustainable living and a great way to spread awareness.

However, it’s essential to note the difference between creating awareness and creating change. Awareness about sustainability is great. But on its own, without a greater understanding of how change develops, it is at best neutral and at worst detrimental in working towards a sustainable future.

So by all means, tweet a picture of yourself picking up trash or taking the city bus to Wegmans. These are potentially positive habits. But it is important to be know that any large scale environmental reform first starts with a healthy understanding of our environment and how everyday systems and institutions interact and impact it.  

Howie Hawkins, an activist, environmental advocate and Green Party candidate in the 2014 New York gubernatorial election, sums it up nicely saying in an Oct. 7 interview with The Daily Orange saying, “We can’t change the direction of society through consumer choices. We need to get control of the production decisions.”

In fact, consumer choices can at times be a result of false awareness to how one’s actions truly impact the environment. Some of the very institutions that are responsible for damaging our environment are capable of framing their product or service in a light aimed at taking advantage of the “environmental consumer.” This tactic, known as “greenwashing,” gives the consumer a false sense of acting sustainably by buying environmentally friendly products.

In reality, consuming these products is hardly benefiting the environment in the slightest, instead perpetuating false senses of accomplishments and thus, rendering another individual irrelevant in the larger push towards real climate reform.  

Effective awareness can be brought into the workplace and turned into action. A smart, environmentally conscious employee has the potential to work his or her way up the power ladder, until they are making the production decisions and can now control environmental impact on a much larger scale than just themselves, shifting the potential from being able to impact those around you to being able to reform larger entities with larger environmental effects.

Effective awareness can be applied when making or voting for public policy. Public policy has infinite potential when it comes to environmental reform. There is currently a polar divide in American politics in what should be done about climate change. Citizens can have all the awareness in the world, know all the right buzzwords and participate in all the right habits, yet still make no tangible difference. But being aware of which candidates have policies that will help the environment and voting for those candidates can make a difference. It is important to understand this because the absolute worst thing is to allow awareness to become an excuse for complacency when in reality nothing has been achieved.

This article is in no ways intended to undermine the Students of Sustainability organization. SOS’s Divest SU campaign is a great example of people coming together and fighting for a larger cause, one that will have an immediate, wide-scale impact. Instead, this serves as a warning, a call to cease falling into stagnation and a false sense of awareness. Yes, let’s be aware, but let’s be aware of which actions make real change.

Azor Cole is a junior public relations major and geography minor. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at azcole@syr.edu.

Published on November 5, 2014 at 12:01 am