When my language course at Goethe Institute in Germany first started, I felt bewildered by the fact that I could no longer easily bring my coffee to class because the cafe downstairs only provided coffee in porcelain cups that had to be  returned to the self-help desk — unless I crossed the street and went to the nearest Starbucks. And after school when I went to supermarkets, I realized plastic bags were not an option in most shops — not even for purchase. I had to bring one of my own, or spend on a relatively expensive cloth bag at the store. And I was surprised to see everyone actually  bring a cloth bag with them everywhere. Such an inconvenience! Why do they do that, I wondered ?

In my host family, I was asked to separate plastics from the other garbage, and to make sure that I switched off all the lights when leaving each room and shut off water when shampooing my hair or brushing my teeth. The wash machine and even the dishwasher were used only once a week when both were completely filled up. There was no dryer and the laundry could only be put up on racks to air-dry. The refrigerator was painfully small partly to save energy. At the university, most buildings had no air-conditioning and our teacher was required to open the windows to let the fresh — and freezing — air in every 60 minutes.

The feeling of inconvenience arose due to many small things, but for people living in Hamburg, where I was now spending a year, it is part of their daily life, and these are their habits — eco-friendly habits. The green movements starting in the early 1980s most likely contributed to the adoption of these habits. And the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 triggered an awareness that then further encouraged a  movement calling for an environmentally friendly style of life. Twenty years later,  an entire generation in Germany and many other places in the Europe have grown up with an awareness of how interconnected and fragile our environment is.

Good policies that provide incentives for energy conservation and innovation as well as more practical reasons like high electricity price can all help explain why Germany leads the world in energy efficiency. But it was still striking and also illuminating to witness and experience how big a role resource-conscious habits play in this country. There are many things that we can see: for example, how friendly this city is to cyclists with the orderly arranged bike lanes all over the town. And there are also many energy-saving attempts that are hidden from our eyes, such as low- or zero-energy buildings, energy-saving home appliances, and organic food supplies. What is most important is that everyone seems to seriously care about the energy usage, and energy conservation is an indispensable part in everyone’s daily life instead of an empty talk of some “elite environmentalists,” or worse, a “hoax” made up by competing nations.

The aggregation of common personal habits reflects values of a nation’s culture. “Grab a drink and run,” for example, is so common in the U.S. that many people walk around a city or a street with plastic cups and straws in their hands, although it is totally unnecessary to keep hydrated all along the way. A reusable water bottle can reduce so much waste. In Starbucks in Germany, ordering a drink “for here” means, by default, receiving your coffee in a china cup. Even baby steps toward the goal of ecological sustainability are worth praising, such as the Grab-and-Go 2.0 project at Smith. To be sure, there is still plenty of space for further progress and remedies, and the public education of environmental awareness must be coupled with right incentives and pragmatic considerations, in order to realize the desirable and far-reaching effect among people across different areas.

It is always easy to label oneself as environmentally friendly while it is not so simple to change the small habits rooted in one’s life. We adapt to the environment while the environment cultivates our habits. Habits and the continuous practice of them make lives easier and this is how the so-called comfort zone starts to build up. The exchange semester in Living in Germany forced drastic changes in my own comfort zone.  The habits that I was not even conscious of manifested themselves when discomfort caused by the loss of them began to disturb me. I suddenly understood that the grocery stores in the US that kindly double-stacked my plastic bags and the restaurants or cafeterias that offered disposable utensils were in fact indulging my  natural tendency to over-consume, to waste and to be blind to the near future of ultimate depletion.  It took a year living in Germany for me to observe the habits of people in another culture, to feel annoyed at the inconvenience of having to change my “comfortable” ways, and then to adopt new habits wholeheartedly.

Tianhua Zhu ’18  is currently a Senior, majoring in both Government and Linguistics. Looking at the intersection between the two majors, she is interested in the politics of language and seeks to understand the language of politics. She participated in the Smith Program in Hamburg in Spring 2017 and took advantage of the great opportunity to travel around several countries in Europe. Originally coming from Shanghai, China, she would like to accumulate more international experiences and bring together distinct perspectives echoing through the East and the West.

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