How to Talk About Going Green Without Boring Everyone

April 22nd was Earth Day. What did you get up to? Tree planting? Organic picnic? Exciting discussions at the office about your company's environmental initiatives? Absolutely nothing? If the last option is the best description of your festivities, there may be a simple explanation for your inability to get excited about saving the earth. Discussing the environment is boring.

Sure, clean tech and public policy for a more sustainable future are rich subjects nerds and wonks can sink their teeth in to, but garden-variety chats about what the average Joe should do to save the earth can get repetitive fast. You recycle, you insulate, you print double sided, you even feel appropriate twinges of guilt, but it's hard to see any change in the status quo. You have "green fatigue." As the UK's Independent newspaper explains:

Fifteen years ago, the term "compassion fatigue" indicated a general disillusionment with fund-raising concerts and famine appeals. The cause was too hopeless, governments too apathetic, and individuals too impotent. Slowly, and for similar reasons, the term "green fatigue" has started to creep into the dinner-party conversations of the composting classes....

Psychologically, we're primed to walk away from problems that are too complex to understand and too difficult to solve, and we'll break into a run if we think cynical marketers and self-publicising celebrities are jumping on a green bandwagon.

For Earth Day this year the magazine put together a slide show of ten unexpected ideas about environmentalism that won't have your conversation partners glancing at their watches. All of them are thought-provoking (a solar-based society would return to feudalism?) but here a few office-appropriate ones to get your interest up:

• Looking at Nature-y Stuff Makes You a Better Person. In 2009, University of Rochester psychologist Netta Weinstein created a fairly bizarre study. She showed people photos of both natural and urban landscapes, then asked them some questions about their life goals. Those shown the nature photos responded more strongly to community and human-connection goals than the ones shown the urban landscapes. That led Weinstein to conclude that nature "brings individuals closer to others, whereas human-made environments orient goals toward more selfish or self-interested end."
• Housewives Created the Environmental Movement, Not Hippies The emergence of what we call environmentalism was a hippie thing, right? Acid-dropping flower children pushed us all to reconsider our relationship to Mother Earth and her far-flung wild places. Well, no, argues environmental historian Adam Rome. In his fantastic book, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, he argues that suburban sprawl created a bunch of environmental problems for suburbanites, particularly women, and that they then interpreted the bigger ecological problems through their direct experience.
• Our Ancestors Were Worse Environmentalists Than We Are. We tend to think of our own generation as the most rapacious. We hear all the time how we're destroying the earth, after all. But J Baldwin, who worked closely with Stewart Brand on the epoch-marking Whole Earth Catalog and associated publications, doesn't believe in that kind of ancestor worship. "Our grandparents were in many ways worse than us. They saw forests as endless and topsoil as beyond measure," he wrote in the book Soft Tech.

Read More on BNET:

• Green Your Office Without Annoying Everyone
• Is Going Green Bad for the Environment?
• Green Jobs: Get Trained Without Breaking the Bank