Which Green Actions Matter Most?: Scott Badenoch of Creative Citizen Offers Insight

Scott Badenoch is the Co-founder and CEO of CreativeCitizen.com, the wiki for green living. Besides being an active lawyer and a member of the California State Bar, he is also a writer for TriplePundit and EcoTimes. He has a Juris Doctorate, a Master's degree in Mediation, Negotiation and Arbitration and a Bachelor's degree in poetry.

What is Creative Citizen?

From Creative Citizen:

Creative Citizen is a mental shift: humans don't always have to be users and abusers, they can also be creators. Instead of continuing down the same path of global unawareness and consumption, a Creative Citizen reduces worldwide problems to daily, personal solutions. Our goal here is to help each person see how little acts have truly big effects.

Creative Citizen equips individuals and communities to move forward in the quest to become responsible global citizens. Instead of focusing on the fear induced by water shortages, expanding landfills, smoggy cities and the specter of global warming, we focus on one action at a time, knowing that a series of small actions can lead to massive results.

PG: Tell us How Users Can Best Utilize Creative Citizen

Scott Badenoch: We made Creative Citizen as simple as possible for people in terms of you do not have to be a registered user to view all of the content there. We do not believe in, sort of, hoarding environmentalism or creating more barriers of entry for people. In order to actually edit the body of solutions you have to register so we know it's not spam, but every bit of information on that website is accessible to the user regardless of whether or not you register. So it is a very simple format in terms of that.

What we encourage people to do is really take environmentalism in an incremental fashion and know that you can?t solve the world's global warming problems with the flip of a switch. And most people simply don't have access to the types of things like Al Gore would have to really effectuate change at a global level.

What really matters for the individuals is what they can do in their own lives and in their home and in their sphere of influence. And at the same time, being green is not just a decision that you make. It is a step-by-step process where you really analyze the things that you do in your life and figure out if you are doing them in the most effective way for yourself and for the planet.

The majority of being green actually is habit-based, meaning things that don't cost you anything but yet yield savings in terms of your resources or directly in terms of your finances. This is what we've done. We've helped people to get into a process of learning and relearning the things that you can do every day.

And the simplest one is to turn the water off while you brush your teeth. That can save anywhere from 2,500 to 3,000 gallons of water a year per person, depending on the type of faucet and how long you brush. That is not a small amount of water. When people recognize that just this little habit change, that literally we just hadn't thought about since we were kids and watched our mom and dad do it this way. It's the simplest change you could possibly ask. Just turn it off. Start the brush process. Get the brush wet and just turn it off until you are ready to rinse.

And those are the sorts of moments that people are having that make them realize that green is not hard. It's not a burden on you. It's simply living your life in a more effective way, especially at a time like this where the recession is the deepest as any of us have seen in our lifetimes and possibly since the Great Depression. This sort of back-to-basics understanding of what is green is very crucial for people to get.

More specifically, the idea of incremental environmentalism says, "Hey. Let's not overwhelm people cause there is so much to deal with in one's own life." That we can't convert immediately to being green all of a sudden. We have to take a more methodical approach to our transition and take one step at a time. You realize, 'Hey. I'm already doing ten things.' So you adopt those on Creative Citizen and you see the effects of what those ten things are yielding and then you do another one and each week you come back and do a couple more. You follow on in this process and before you know it, you are doing 50 to 100 things. And you can say, 'I'm genuinely a green person.'

Now another piece to this, is that being green doesn't mean being perfect. And it's very difficult for people to get that. You see from the top end things like Al Gore getting a lot of heat because he flies all over the country and has a huge home with a big electricity bill and blah, blah, blah. Well, he's doing incredible work that has been some of the most important in the movement, and he needs to fly around and meet people and talk to big audiences to get this thing going, well worth the CO2 emissions that he's emitted in the result.

At the same time, he could be a little bit greener, so could all of us. It's not about being perfect, but it's about doing what we can do now and into the future. So this is why, fundamentally, Creative Citizens is not a carbon calculator or a lot of these other services that are out there, which are very cool tools and can have a lot of benefits. At the same time, they look into the past. They say, 'How bad are you?' And we fundamentally don't believe in that part of the mantra. Because, one, it's demotivational. People don't want to know how quote-unquote bad they are, and, frankly, they're not bad. They've simply been living the way they that they thought was the right way to live. There was no intention to be a waster.

We really want people to recognize that the power they have is right now and going into the future. You can't go back into the past and change what they?ve done. They can change they way they live right now. That's really what we focus on, on a fundamental level.

Read the next page "Part II: Meet Scott Badenoch of Green Living Wiki Creative Citizen."