Over the past few months I've been trying to define the essence of why development work is so hard. If it were easy, well, the developing countries would have already developed. On a macro level there's a slew of issues from poor governance to the educated workforce leaving for greener pastures to poor allocation of aid. But seemingly, on the community level, these factors shouldn't really come into play. Why is my personal development work so hard?
In essence, I'm tasked with implementing behavioral change. I'm trying to rally a community around completely foreign ideas. It's one thing to organize and motivate around something that everyone believes in. It's quite another when they've never heard of the ideas you're proposing.
That brings me to climate change, a good analogy to illustrate this point. Let's imagine that it's 1998. The Y2K crisis is still off the map. Dot coms are booming. The economy is doing well. Seemingly America has hit its stride. You're working for a small outfit lobbying for better environmental policies. Your role is education. You travel all over the US meeting with people on college campuses, coffee shops, etc. But it's 1998. Green buzzwords haven't drifting into the collective conscious. Times are good. People are complacent. For all your competence in listing off the problems on the horizon and what we need to do to change course, you have this feeling it's all falling on deaf ears.
Let's fast forward to today. While people know more than they did twelve years ago, we're still not exactly storming the halls of Congress. We're in a crisis folks. This isn't just about saving obscure species of butterflies and villages you read about in National Geographic. Entire species are going extinct every twenty minutes. Over two million people die every year from air pollution. More than 80% of the world's natural forests have been destroyed.
But how do you mount a green revolution? How do you bring climate change to the forefront? It's so abstract. Temperature differences of a degree or two? Ocean rises of maybe a foot in the next century? The statistics seem almost palatable. There are dire consequences for inaction, but it seems so far off, so removed from daily life.
So that's life on the Rio Mananti. People are dying from totally preventable health issues. But it's hard to tease those deaths out of the white noise of life where people come and go. People acknowledge that sicknesses come from drinking contaminated water and there is a basic understanding of disease transmission. It's just not quite enough for action. So for now, I keep on keepin' on with the idea that eventually these ideas will stick, that behavioral change is just around the corner.
