The conversation began benignly enough: a discussion with my roommates of life cycle assessments (LCA) and how disposable coffee cups may or may not be better than re-usable mugs. It did not take long before the conversation went from the limitations of LCA to the much murkier territory of whether or not people will care enough to make changes before resource depletion forces us into a nasty evolutionary conundrum.
Why do so many conversations about environmental issues descend into philosophical arguments over human nature??
At that point it looked as if we were at an impasse - while I argued that people and society can make changes, I appeared outflanked by the cynical routine of "no way man, people just don't give a damn about anything except instant gratification". Mind you, this was a conversation among three medical students - so an interesting insight into potential predispositions towards patients. One (me) sucker thinking the reality TV junkies just might start exercising and the other thinking the lady with a sickle cell crisis is really looking for a morphine fix...
I thought about this for a moment and came up with a workable counter argument. I pointed out that smoking cigarettes was once commonplace: less than 30 years ago people smoked at work, in airplanes, at home in front of children - everyone smoked everywhere! If you had told people back then that there would be a time when you couldn't smoke inside buildings or even in bars(!) they would have thought you were crazy and that it would never happen... yet it did. And it happened because society as a whole recognized the inherit health risks from smoking and judged their lungs and wellbeing to be of greater value than convenience and gratification.
Unexpectedly, this point was granted and one more human realized that there is the possibility that things can change for the better...
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