The second in my series of columns to ask why so many of us say that we regard environmental issues as important, but it doesn't really show in our lives, writes Henry Haslam.
I discuss here the argument that, however much I do, it still counts for nothing in the grand scheme of things.
I can make no difference.
Even the contribution of the UK is small when we look at the global picture.
Edmund Burke, the 18th-century political thinker, had a simple answer to this: "No one made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do so little."
I often read that there is no point in this country bothering to reduce our carbon emissions, because other countries are emitting far more carbon than we are.
This ignores the fact that governments around the world, including those of China and India, are making huge efforts to reduce their carbon emissions.
What interests me here, though, is the quality of their reasoning, the logic of the litter lout: my litter doesn’t matter when you look at how much of other people’s litter there is around.
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There are plenty of situations where we act in the public interest, even when we know that our personal contribution makes little difference to the wider picture and that it might be in our interests to act differently.
We are quite used to acting in the public interest.
Voting can easily be regarded as a waste of time, for example.
It is most unusual for an election to be decided by a single vote, and your time would be better spent doing something else.
But lots of people still turn out to vote, and many regard the right to vote as so important that they have campaigned vigorously, sometimes at great sacrifice, to win that right.
We give to charity.
We know that our small donation achieves very little, but we like to know that it combines with other people’s contributions to make a real difference.
More widely, there is a long history of communities all over the world managing common resources (grazing, water for irrigation, fisheries) for the common good.
One individual can take more than their share and ruin the resource for everyone else.
But they don’t.
(There are too many exceptions recently – and they are newsworthy just because they offend against what we regard as normal, decent behaviour.)
Our environment and our planet are our common resources.
If we live to preserve it for others, for the future, we are following a long human tradition.
