“The truth is impact is never guaranteed by good intent.”– Ariel Moyal
This statement by Ariel, in her post Intent and Impact Walk Into a Bar, about impact versus intent is very interesting. We do often think that when we have good intentions that there will be a good outcome or impact. But that is not always the case. If you think about it, a lot of the time when something goes wrong we end up saying ‘it was with good intentions’ to make the problem not as bad or to at least make ourselves feel better about what happened.
This realization that good intent does not necessarily lead to a good impact or outcome is vital for environmental issues and solutions. Ariel is right in that we would not want to go through with a project that we started with good intentions if the impact is not good. Throughout history there have been many cases where people try to do something with good intentions and create a mess. For example, with solutions to feed people, the intentions are good, but the majority of efforts have either not lasted, are unsustainable, or are detrimental to health and/or the environment.
With my own life, I try to have good intentions. But what does that really mean? To have an intention means to premeditate what the aim or the goal of something is and how you are going to go about that. I think sometimes we have intentions that we didn’t really think about or decide how to go about them, so how do we deal with those intentions? The ones that are there but we don’t feel accountable for? In our personal lives we can shrug them off if they are not good intentions, but for the environment we can’t do that. We need to make sure that our intentions are actually well thought out and deliberate.