Still, humans are always motivated to try to change. Our New Year’s resolutions are notoriously hard to achieve, yet there we are, in the gloom of January, promising that this year will be different. When it doesn’t happen, are we just weak-willed? No, it’s far more complicated than that and entire fields of science are devoted to understanding why we follow certain patterns of behaviour.
The UK government under the premiership of David Cameron famously had its ‘nudge unit’, or Behavioural Insights Team. They recommended changes to improve delivery of policy and engagement of citizens. By tweaking tax letters, by personalising communications, by introducing strong ‘social norms’, they increased the compliance in paying income tax. All by changing a few words in a letter, governments receive more tax. That is powerful stuff.
One of the most important fields, conservation psychology, relates to our behaviours around the environment that we seem intent on degrading at a rapid rate. The Living Planet Index suggests that we are on track to lose two-thirds of all wild animals by 2020. We face a future where even the most charismatic animals on Earth, like elephants and orang-utan, may be gone forever by the middle of this century. Some people will not care, I get that, but I think the majority of us will feel that we are, as humans, a little diminished by our inability to protect nature. Yet, we know that conservation can work when given the resources.
We are better at recycling, we give money to nature protection, and campaigns to change our behaviour have shown success, but sometimes we have to admit that time is not on our side or that the consequences of the slow movement of societal attitudes are too damaging. There are times when what we must look at is not societal change leading to behaviour change and then legislative change, but the other way around, legislation leading to societal change. For example, the vast majority of us wear our seatbelts in cars, and we would feel odd, unsafe, if we did not – we know it is the law, but it is also or own behavioural ‘norm’. Up until the introduction of seatbelt laws, the majority of drivers did not wear seatbelts, even when surveys indicated that people understood that wearing a belt prevented injuries. It took legislative change to make happen what we all already knew to be blindingly obvious – we save lives by buckling up.
One area where I believe we need to introduce relevant legislation to Jersey is in relation to plastics. Plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic microbeads in our cosmetics and hygiene products. Plastic is everywhere and we are drowning in a metaphorical sea of it. Most worryingly, the beautiful real seas are increasingly polluted, with estimates that the tonnage of plastic waste in the oceans will soon outweigh the tonnage of fish. Plastics are found in the guts of seabirds, wrapped around turtles, are consumed by fish and other sea creatures and in turn are then consumed again by us. A million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals are killed by careless disposal of plastic each year.
Yet, plastics only recently became a factor of human experience, invented in the 1900s. Our great-grandparents lived their lives either plastic free or with very little plastic. The very durability of plastic is its strength but also presents us with an enormous problem with nearly every single piece of plastic ever made still with us, and it will be with us for hundreds of years to come, lying in waste sites, or in our countryside or our seas. Single-use plastic is the worst offender and very little ends up being recycled.
Plastic bags are a case in point. I have a ‘bag of plastic bags’ at home, I think we all do. I try hard to remember to take my canvas bags or re-use the plastic bags I already have, taking them with me when I go shopping, but sometimes I forget. It is estimated that up to one trillion plastic bags are manufactured each year and most are never reused, only one in every 200. The average use time of a plastic bag is 12 minutes – just think of the oil used to make the bag, the energy expended, all for something that might be used for just 12 minutes.
It is true that charging for bags has led to impressive reductions wherever it has been introduced. However, I think it is time we decided that legislation to phase out all plastic bags in Jersey is the way to go.
Delhi in India just banned all disposable plastics. California has banned disposable plastic bags, as has Mexico City and numerous cities around the world. Rwanda did this some years ago and Kenya is trying to get the law changed now.
Let’s show leadership and prevent plastic bags from despoiling our countryside and seas. Imagine that, a plastic bag-free Jersey. A great marketing tool for our tourism industry, positioning us as forward-thinking and caring for the beautiful environment we hope tourists will visit.
Goodbye plastic bags, we will learn how to live without you, and legislation will hasten that change.
