Tianai Zhang

I have been conscious about saving energy and resources since I was little. This awareness was reflected through simple actions like turning off the lights and AC before going out or using a basket to save some running water before the shower heats up, then using it to flush the toilet. By "little", I mean something like 7 years old. It wasn't about me being a young environmentalist, but simply my perfectionist tendencies of doing things in ways I like. I always have this disturbing feeling when I see food piling up on the returned plates in the dining hall, lights left on in public areas during breaks, and dozens of pieces of paper thrown into the trash after being used once in a class.

I didn't practice my responsibility perfectly, though, despite my compulsion to get things right. I didn't throw my cardboards and plastic bottles in recycling bins outside (back home, there's no recycling bin in our trash station) because the 5-min walk seems to be too much effort for me; I order take-out as often as I want and do nothing about the indecomposable packaging despite the guilt; I have no restraint whatsoever with tap water, the best I've done is to turn it off when I'm brushing my teeth. Still, without being too critical, I am pretty much on the side of practicing pro-environmental behaviors.

However, it has been a lonely journey on the path of environmentalism as almost everyone around me- friends, family, schoolmates, or random people in a restaurant- seems concerned about the amount of electricity, water, and food we waste. The social-psychological tendencies simply prevent me from speaking up or doing anything further as it would make me look foolish.

As a result of this avoidance of pressure, I have not paid much attention to climate change. I don't have any further understanding of the climate crisis other than knowing that humans continue to emit carbon emissions, the world population continues to grow, that extinctions resume, and we still dump trash into the sea, leave piles of food on the table, pollute underground water and cut trees, making little effort in changing those behaviors. In the last 5 years, however, natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, droughts, and historically high temperatures are getting unignorable. The humanitarian tragedies that followed these disasters seem to be giving a final call for immediate action.

For this reason, I am glad that I got the chance through Project Drawdown to move one step forward after 10+ years of staying in the same place. It means a lot to apply the tools of social science to studying the technicalities of green actions. My college studies have been centered around observing human behavior, and it's fun to study means that incentivize people to protect the earth. It is also fun to look into the creative ways that people came up with to slow down the climate crisis.
Hopefully, by spreading efforts like Project Drawdown and increasing collective actions, we can take on individual responsibility and make meaningful changes to the current climate crisis.

(Below: an image of the glaring lights around Drake Stadium turned on at night when no one's on the field- a common phenomenon of excessive power consumption)