While gathering the secondary research sources, I was able to recall a lot of documentaries that I’ve seen in the past.  What I recall from watching all of them, is that afterwards I always felt a combination of informed, guilty, and self-righteous. The feeling wouldn’t last for very long; maybe a day to a week, before I would stop thinking the issues brought up in the documentary. For instance, in the documentary “bag it: is your life too plastic?” I learned about how all the plastic garbage in the ocean had created the Great Pacific garbage patch, which is a collection of mostly plastic garbage which pollutes the ocean and destroys the habitat for a lot of sea-life.

After watching this film, there is a list of suggestions to help stop plastic pollution during everyday activities. This is actually a tactic that a lot of activist documentaries have begun to employ in the last decade. Most of the activist documentaries already take the teacher’s role of educating the under-informed /misinformed, so it makes sense that they would extend the idea to basically giving viewers “homework.”  Even though the feelings I had about the film faded, I continued to practice some of the suggestions given at the end of it; such as simply saying “no” when asked if I want a bag for something I can just hold in my hands with minimal extra effort.

The lesson I’m taking from this is that if you are trying to inspire a change in the world, it is not enough to just make people feel bad about something; you’ve got to give them something to do about it. Even more so, if those actions are something that can be done frequently enough, then they will be easy habits for people to form. In applying this to our bounding term “climate change,” I think that an activity that has positive reinforcement(delight) will bring people to habitually act to make a difference without relying on guilt as a motivator.