How veganism became mainstream | The Spectator
Government and environmentalists need to understand this. To achieve change, you needn’t legislate so everyone adopts new behaviours simultaneously: you simply need to ensure every desirable new behaviour (veganism, installing solar panels, not flying when you can travel by train) reaches that level where it no longer looks weird. If just 10 per cent of attendees refuse to fly to a meeting, it becomes essential to offer videoconferencing, at which point a further 10 per cent will opt to attend the meeting remotely. If 10 per cent start taking trains to Frankfurt, it will pay to launch a European sleeper train service, at which point another 10 per cent will take the train. Once someone on your street has solar panels, you’ll feel happier installing your own. The biggest single influence on whether people drink Guinness in a pub is whether there is already someone in the pub drinking Guinness. A lot of socially beneficial behaviours work the same way. It’s not that we don’t want to do them — we do. We just don’t want to be the weirdo who does it first.
