You think you’re helping by recycling your two bags of garbage every week? All that does is make you think you have the right to deflect personal responsibility. If you use services provided by any wasteful corporation, you are the problem, and you are still responsible for finding a solution. “…the vast majority (of energy consumption) is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution…. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.”
photo credit: mpwillis1

We need policy changes that require social responsibility to qualify for subsidies and tax cuts, not random scatterings of hippies who skip a shower to save water. You want to know how to really help? Fight to end corporate welfare for those who make the world a worse place to live. If a corporation isn’t making the United States a better country, do you think they deserve your tax dollars? We need to make the world better, not just slow down how fast we make it worse. And we can, but not by skipping showers, recycling, riding a bike, and then brushing our hands off like we fixed everything.
photo credit: Neubie

Jensen, Derrick. "Why personal change does not equal political change.(Upping the Stakes: Forget Shorter Showers)." Synthesis/Regeneration  1 Aug. 2009. Print.