Environmental stewardship manifests itself as reactive activities, regulations and enforcement. All three assume people will behave badly when it comes to environmental stewardship.
We have Earth Day and other focal events, but the underlying challenge is the lack of behavioral and cultural stewardship toward those actions, or lack of actions, that result in the need for beach clean-ups and other remediation initiatives.
To affect real environmental stewardship a critical mass of the right behaviors, organizations, and leadership are needed to affect a cultural change.
We must move from a society of event-based responses to a culture of environmental stewardship.
To highlight this concept, civic-minded organizations muster groups of people who ‘clean-up’ the bad behavior of a whole lot of other people. Once the clean-up crews are done, the trash build-up begins again. These clean-ups deal only with garbage that is physical and can be seen. There are also plastics and microplastics, chemical pollution, industrial, and even radioactive effluent.
Reactive approaches rarely produce lasting outcomes. To affect real environmental stewardship a critical mass of the right behaviors, organizations, and leadership are needed to affect a cultural change.
The Graduate (1967)
Land, sea and air carry billions of tons of plastic in all forms, benign and toxic, from macro objects such as jungle gyms and boats, to pieces and fragments filling the guts of sea creatures, to micro particles in the sea salt we sprinkle on food.