Welcome to Alex Lim's green blog! =) In this blog, I will be catching up with what I will be learning through my Environmental Action workshop and just generally illustrating my experiences as a proud Babson Eco-Rep, step by step, with my strong desire to be eco-friendly and active about promoting green, thus saving the world!
So, this post is my brief description of my new "eco-self." I am calling this blog "The Green Star" because my Korean name (Jong Kyu Lim) means a star and I'd like to be a person just like a shining star in various ways. In addition, not only is green my favorite color, but also it represents my will to cultivate my eco-ego and therefore become greener.
As a crucial part of Babson college encompasses a very practical and hands-on approach to business, I would like to apply this exact principle to the way I utilize my experience as an Eco-Rep. This led me into a deep thinking in terms of what I really can and should do in order to truly influence people around the campus. One of the first things that popped up in my mind was recycling. Babson offers students to do Single-Stream recycling, a very convenient way to recycle things properly. However, I recognized how a good portion of students lack sufficient knowledge as to how to recycle and why it is so important.
Consequently, I decided to take a very direct approach to improve the situation. Whenever I was around my friends, I tried to emphasize how to recycle properly and how this can leave such a huge impact. At the same time, I tried to careful not to sound either accusatory or authoritative in terms of correcting my peers. I attempted to show them by examples, re-recycling things by myself with less words.
After about a couple weeks of my attempts to correct the recycling behavior, I discovered my friends became more careful when throwing stuff in trash cans, whenever I was around them. Since I put a bigger focus on my actions rather than words, it seemed like people well understood the significance of proper recycling.
Initially, I've gotten very pessimistic responses from my peers. They thought I was just being silly and jocular when I demonstrated them how I actually care about recycling. They didn't seem to understand the fact that an individual's behavior can result in a dramatic difference in that it will easily affect other people's behaviors. To reiterate, since I showed them my "eco-ego" by action on a regular basis, my peers seemed to feel more obligated to follow the rules.
I used to be very introvert when it comes to broaching such topics as environmental issues or religious issues, presuming that people will automatically label me as a tree hugger or Jesus freak. However, as my desire of becoming more eco-friendly grew significantly, I learned that I need to be responsible for such things as informing other people about the significance of promoting green and being environmentally friendly. As a result, I looked and sounded more genuine and passionate about environmental issues, so my peers became more understanding when I tried to preach them.
Different people certainly gave me different responses, from completely admiring my effort to help others being green to entirely rejecting the truth that it is indeed important that you as an individual are responsible for environmental issues.
This is very natural that everyone has given me different responses, since not many people share same backgrounds, experiences, or perspectives. This taught me how I need to be flexible in terms of being very consistent and patient about teaching my peers the right thing: being responsible themselves.
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