This past week at Rose Scholars, the speaker was house professor Garrick Blalock, and he spoke to us about adopting technology that is better for us.  The talk began by speaking about cars.  Professor Blalock asked us how we felt about saving the environment.  Obviously, all of us thought we should be doing what we could for the environment.  He then asked us how many of us had environmentally friendly cars, to which only three or four people raised their hands.  We then discussed the difficulties involved in getting people to use environmentally friendly cars — cost, appeal, etc.  We discussed how those might be overcome, and then finished by realizing that even with these ways to overcome the issues, not everyone would have environmentally friendly cars.  It came down to the fact that each individual person does not think so much that their individual impact on the environment will matter in the grand scheme of things.

The talk then shifted focus to Africa, where Professor Blalock spent some time doing research.  He told us about how many people use open fire stoves in the tight quarters of their homes, and how damaging this could be.  Children breathing in the smoke constantly is incredibly harmful to them, as well as to their mothers.  Additionally, the mothers have to walk for miles a day to gather firewood, which aids in deforestation.    As part of his work, Professor Blalock helped provide 400 efficient and safe cook stoves for families to use in place of the open fire stoves.  These new stoves would be safer to use and require less fuel — an overall improvement.  However, what Professor Blalock discovered was that at the end of the research, several years later, almost none of the families were still using the cook stoves.

I heard part of this talk last year when Professor Blalock gave it, but I was just as amazed by it this time.  It is shocking how hard it is for people to adopt a new technology, even if it is so much better for them or the environment or the world.  I like to think that when I go out into the world, I will get an environmentally friendly car, because it is better for the environment and the world and my children’s children’s future.  But of course it is equally likely that I will just go the traditional route and just get what is easiest for me as an individual.  Hopefully myself and the others of my generation can do a better job of thinking about others in our choices.