Filling the Gap

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As we were working on the paperwork for tax exempt status for the Pacific Mountain Institute, John and I had numerous discussions about what we were trying to accomplish with this entity. At one point I described a perspective that I think summarizes where we hope to fill a gap.

When looking at environmental and social problems, there have traditionally been two approaches: Top down regulations and legislation from government entities and Bottom up grass roots efforts by the public. While both of these avenues for effecting change have seen varying amounts of success there remains a gap in effectiveness between the two approaches.

Governments can not and should not regulate decisions made by individuals that fall within their rights to have free choice. Governments should and do protect individuals from unsafe and destructive behavior in a broad sense, but on individual decisions like how much energy an individual uses to heat his or her house, the government has no role.

Similarly, citizen activists have done an admirable job of bringing attention to serious environmental and social issues through eduction, publicity, and in some cases legal action. However, these grass roots efforts can only appeal to an individual to make the right choices to help society as a whole. Again, on the issue of energy use for heating a home, environmental advocates can only provide information to influence an individual's choice.

Between these two forces, lies a huge realm of individual choice. This arena is most often expressed through individual choices by consumers. In the circumstances where aggregated consumer choices create a larger issue for society, like energy use on a statewide level and its carbon footprint, this middle ground becomes increasingly important and significantly harder to change from the top down or bottom up.

This resulting gap in influence from governments and activists is the realm of daily interactions of individuals as consumers of goods and services and companies providing those goods and services for a profit. Instead of this being an unapproachable arena for change, I believe this provides a huge opportunity for new ways to interact with individuals in the ways that they are accustomed to as consumers. This is were we hope to fill the gap.

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