USING THE “LIFESTYLE PROJECT” TO INCREASE ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS

The Lifestyle Project is a tool for helping students understand the kinds of changes that each of us can make to reduce our impact on the environment. Although the project addresses a range of environmental issues, it is particularly applicable to an awareness of our individual contributions to climate change. Completion of the project requires students to make significant changes to their lifestyles—in areas such as transportation, energy use, water use, waste and diet—and to keep a written record of those changes and their personal impacts. A key aspect of the project is that it challenges students to make increasingly stringent changes over a period of several weeks.

We will describe the adaptation of the Lifestyle Project, in both face-to-face and on-line courses, in three different educational settings in the US, Canada and Great Britain. We will discuss how the project works and how students respond to their lifestyle changes; we will also present the results of longitudinal studies into the impact of the project on the participants' behaviours and attitudes.

Some of our findings are as follows: • Students report a growing realization that ‘talk is cheap' and that action is far more challenging. • Most students experience a shift in their awareness—they discover the need to think about their environmental impact before they act. • Many students comment that reducing their environmental impact has time and convenience costs, however some discover that they can actually save time and money, and improve their quality of life, through their efforts to protect the environment. • Some students report that small changes early in the project are easy but substantial changes, made towards the end, are much more difficult. • Students enrolled in an on-line course found that the Lifestyle Project created a strong sense of community and teamwork. • The “take-home” nature of the Lifestyle Project means that its effects commonly extend to family, friends and beyond.

More information on the Lifestyle Project is available at: http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/enviroprojects/lifestyle.html