A few weeks ago, The Washington Post ran an article about the power of symbolic actions within the environmental movement—and about how those symbolic acts can derail useful, real-world solutions. The author, Shankar Vedantam, points out that if all the people who participated in Earth Hour by turning off their lights had instead switched even one incandescent bulb to a compact fluorescent, the energy savings would have been enormous, perhaps as much as 1,368 times higher.

Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California’s Energy Institute, observes in the same article that it can be hard to persuade people to make changes that yield the biggest energy savings, rather than the biggest returns in self-satisfaction. Unfortunately, taking 45 seconds to screw in a CFL feels less historic than seeing all your neighbors’ homes go dark in solidarity. And those candlelit dinners and satellite photos of darkened cities are just cool.

I bring this up because it’s important to examine our symbols. People are irrational, no matter how much we like to think otherwise. Even when we know that our actions are ineffectual or that they are pure self-sabotage, we attach importance to them, particularly when they’ve engaged deeper altruistic or egotistical drives. Scientists can (and do) talk about damaged ecosystems, floodwaters, and crop loss from climate change until they’re blue in the face, but most of us like a certain amount of pomp and circumstance, as I implied in my post on Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute. That’s why the image of the polar bear drowning as its icebergs melt is such a good messenger for the dangers of global warming.

However, building a movement around a negative, as argued by Claude Lewenz at WorldChanging, is not only shortsighted but useless. “The Environment Movement tends to include high-minded people who do not profit by depredation calling for restraints on other people who do profit by it. Sadly, when high-minded people realize they will be adversely affected by those restraints (such as living in a suburb and being told the price of fuel is about to quadruple), many tend to back off a bit … all except the purists: the purists endure sacrifice (ride a bike in miserable weather) but tend to have little impact on the total rate or scale of depredation because they are such a small minority.” Motivating by fear, whether of drowning polar bears, crashing oil supplies, or Cyclone Nargis, is only likely to effect change as long as that change is minor and requires little or no sacrifice.

Right now, most of us are on the low-sacrifice end of the spectrum. We use reusable bags, buy organic, or consider hybrid cars. None of these choices is particularly difficult, and some of them serve self-interest as much as—or more than—they do the environment.

In our buildings, we add on the features that require little extra cost but pay us back the most in terms of good press, savings, or self-satisfaction. Sometimes, we feel so uncomfortable with the changes we’re making that we feel the need to draw attention to them, like Emory University’s recycled rainwater, which must be dyed blue so no one confuses it with municipal water.

That’s assuming, of course, that we do anything at all. It’s easy to be paralyzed by all the noise coming from contradictory climate models (hurricanes will get worse, actually, hurricanes will happen less), competing life-cycle analyses (food miles, anyone?), carbon-quantifying in a globalized world, political parties, and corporate propaganda.

Rather than point to purely symbolic green buildings, harbingers of doom, or public acts of self-conscious cheerleading, we would be better served by building a sustainable future right into our walls. “In order to have a significant effect,” Lewenz says, “one needs to change the framework for large numbers of people, not simply those who understand the problem. One must remove the need for the product.” Instead of turning off our lights for an hour and calling it progress, how about asking architects to situate our buildings for the maximum possible daylight, changing our entire relationship to artificial light? Several decades from now, we may look back on Earth Hour and chuckle at the quaintness of the idea.

If we intend to favor substance over style, as we must in the very near future, we will integrate our transit, production, education, housing, food, and energy needs. Infrastructure takes time to evolve: While the cars we were driving in the early 80s are practically all gone now, buildings and roads have much longer lives. Colleges—as part of their environmental-outreach efforts and also because they seek savings—are already experimenting with buildings that favor conservation, human health, and long-term sustainability. But change comes slowly.

In that spirit, perhaps we need a new symbol. Instead of a beleaguered polar bear, I propose we use a map. A map’s job is not to exaggerate, applaud, or terrify. A map is open to interpretation, and boundaries can be redrawn as often as necessary according to new information. It represents the past work of the cartographer, the present work of the urban planner, and the possibilities of the traveler. Essentially, a map can be both substance and symbol, instrument and icon.

Or perhaps we should reject the idea that any symbol, no matter how clever, will accurately represent the energy and environmental challenges ahead. Our best response may be simply to roll up our sleeves. —Xarissa Holdaway

Xarissa Holdaway, one of May’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is campus e-news coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation’s campus-ecology project. You can read her previous posts here, here, and here.