...from different points of view:
Anne-Marie: Culinary revelation
Mark Powell: Saving the ocean with guilt or desire? and Does the sustainable seafood movement rely on guilt? (blogfish poll)
Miriam Goldstein: Guilty as charged
Amanda Marcotte: Save your soul with recycling
More like this
I cannot embed the official video but here's another version:
A new study suggests collective guilt can inspire action, but only if people feel reasonably hopeful that things can get better. The study, based on questionnaires to ~150 undergraduate students, also found that guilt was a more effective emotion in encouraging mitigation behavior than anxiety.
Call it religious, call it effective (or ineffective), call it trite. The fact is, there is a lot of guilt-laden language in the conservation movement. Because this will help lay the foundation for future discussions, I wanted to present some examples here.
I think a "backyard permaculture food forest" is what my grandmothers called a "vegetable garden". ;-)
My reactions to the social phenomena described in the NYT article (snark-smacked by Amanda Marcotte) are mixed: on the one hand, I think it's great that environmental awareness and green practices are even considered by some people, but on the other hand, many of those efforts smack of smugness and hypocrisy. It's not just the educated suburban moms either-there were a couple of interesting posts at The World's Fair on this very same hypocritical phenomenon in academicians, particularly scientists.