Do You Ever Get Eco-Fatigue?

Have you heard of “eco-fatigue?” Maybe “green-fatigue?” 

What is “eco-fatigue?” 

Originally it was a marketing term, used as a warning to advertisers, that if you try to scare people into buying enough “green” projects, they’ll get bummed out and just buy an SUV instead - sort of the way people on diets too long have been known to freak out and dive into a bag of chips.

 

But could there be a deeper implication for “eco-fatigue” than someone who’s sick of green advertising? (I mean, hell, I write about this as a hobby and even I’M sick of getting lectured on TV…)

 

I think there’s a real case to be made that all of this gets tiring after a while - how many times can you hear about the dangers of pollution, or the cheapskates in big business, or corrupt politicians before you just get sick of it all?

 

What can we do about it, anyways?

Have you ever read one too many articles and just said “Why bother? What can I do about this anyways?”

I know I have.

It seems to me, though, that this isn’t a problem of people getting too much news about the environment. I could read about wildlife and the outdoors all day long.

 

The real problem, I think, is the lack of options - what in the world can we DO about all this stuff? All the information coming down the pipe is about the things that are wrong in the world, not what we can do about it. How are people supposed to process that much bad news? Maybe it’s not eco-fatigue, but eco-depression? 

 

We’ve heard it all - we know about fossil fuels, we know about acid rain, we know about endangered species, and we know about the rainforests. What we don’t know why, is decades later, why isn’t anything being done? Why don’t people seem to care about this? 

 

The problem is bigger than just advertising

I’m not sure, but I think that “eco-fatigue” is a lot broader than advertising. It’s not just a challenge to companies trying to sell green products, but to people and organizations trying to fix environmental issues. 

This is more important than selling a product - this is convincing the public what we need to do to, quite literally, save the world…or one that we can live in, at least.

 

So what can we do? Have you ever felt this way? And what do you think would environmentalists can do to avoid giving people this feeling?