Automatically Green
Cass Sunstein on Green Defaults
Yesterday I had the chance to see Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former “regulation czar,” give a talk at the University of Chicago Law School about, among many other things, how people can be encouraged to make environmentally responsible choices.
There are a lot of people who don’t care much, one way or the other, about the environment. That’s a shame, but it’s a problem for another day. Today I want to focus on the growing number of people who do care about the environment, but often fail to act that way.
Sometimes, the problem is that the environmentally responsible choice is hard or costly — failing to make that choice is understandable. But other times the problem is that making the wrong choice is too easy.
Look at the photograph above — I took it right after Sunstein’s talk yesterday right outside the law school. There’s a beautifully manicured lawn, with a path cutting through it, leaving the grass trampled under the feet of hundreds of short-cut-takers.
This preservation of this lawn isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but consider it symbolically. Instead of taking the extra six seconds or so to walk along the sidewalk, people take the shortcut across the lawn. I know I did on my way in. No individual is really doing much damage, but collectively they’ve destroyed part of the lawn. If you asked them, many of them might tell you that they never intended to destroy the lawn; they were just taking a shortcut and didn’t really think about it.
They’d be right — we make a lot of choices pretty automatically. You see the shortcut, made obvious by the already-pretty-trampled grass, and you take it without a further thought. After all, everyone else is doing it, and it’s already pretty trampled, so what difference would one more trampling make, anyway? The same goes for littering, or tossing something recyclable in the trash, or drinking out of a one-time-use bottle instead of a reusable one, or a million other little things that we all do, that we don’t think much of. If it were just as easy to do the environmentally responsible thing we would, and we’d be happy doing it. But often it’s not, so we commit the harmless sin, and those sins add up.
Sunstein’s approach is to try to flip this situation around. Ideally, to make the automatic choice the green one, leaving people free to take the short cut, but only if they really want to. Imagine a simple sign that says, please stay off the grass. It’s not a law and nobody would enforce it — you could still cut across the grass if you really wanted to. But it would just make it a tiny bit easier to make the green choice automatically: The sign says please keep off; I guess I’ll take the extra six seconds and walk around.
