Zdzislaw Nitak

Zdzislaw Nitak is building environmental consciousness in Polish cities by focusing on the connection between urban household habits and environmental decay. He works with youth, teachers, parents, government authorities, and neighborhood associations, not only to change the patterns of their own consumption, but also to consolidate an efficient lobbying structure to influence laws, policy makers, and producers alike.

Zdzislaw targets his environmental awareness campaign to urban households, an area much neglected by Poland's nascent environmental movement. His focus is on changing people's daily habits regarding consumption patterns and resource conservation. He believes that as consumers, we can influence the future and make a serious impact on local environmental policy and quality of life--and that Poles need to be convinced of this.His consciousness-building program currently focuses on four urban municipalities, and consists of two principal branches: youth education and adult workshops for families, government officials, and public service leaders. In schools, Zdzislaw is responsible for designing new curricula and producing new literature that emphasizes the connections between daily habits and environmental protection. In the community, he builds teams of citizens for training in environmentally safe living. Each household fills out a survey on consumption before and after the meetings and is shown in concrete terms how to lower environmental damage caused by the family. At the same time, these techniques have the immediate effect of lowering consumer costs--and for this reason Zdzislaw believes that his ideas will spread quickly.Zdzislaw's programs and materials reflect methods which actively involve participants in concrete activities--composting, environmentally safe shopping, recycling, etc. He believes in the power of a good example, and is already working on new avenues for the growth of his programs to the business community.

Zdzislaw says that there is twice as much waste today as there was before 1989. It is certainly true that much more hazardous waste and pvc's are produced and disposed in landfills than ever before. There is also much more use of powerful household detergents

and cleaning agents which are extremely damaging to the environment. But worst of all, there is no movement to draw simple causal connections between the habits of urban households and the continuing degradation of the environment.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle, when faced with the post-1989 environmental question, is people's apathy: most feel that the individual can affect no real change. For a half-century, under communism's yoke, public problems have been solved "from above," and have occupied a domain entirely isolated from the private habits of households. Zdzislaw understands that these entrenched perceptions must change, and he is convinced that people simply need more support in their decision-making. They need to be shown that individual responsibility makes a difference. Simply spreading information and statistics, he says, does not solve the problem and does not create change effectively--only community action and direct involvement can change attitudes and behaviors.

So far, the small inroads that Polish environmental groups have made are growing slowly and in very narrow domains. The whole area of urban pollution, for instance, has received almost no emphasis in the environmental protection sphere in Poland: households are a diffuse and difficult target group to reach, and their bad habits are less visible than the destruction of ecosystems and "nature" resources. Yet the day-to-day, routine pollution is increasing, and many of the recycling programs that existed under communism, have disappeared, placing urban conservation in an even worse position than before. While activists' attention is focused on nature and wildlife preservation, urban households continue to contribute to the dramatic increase in environmental degradation. Certain simple steps could be taken to improve the situation significantly: if, for instance, waste and water were separated for recycling, waste disposal would drop by 25 percent; if people composted, total urban waste produced in households would drop another 25 percent. But the implementation of such simple initiatives requires a careful and comprehensive strategy that tackles residual notions of individual powerlessness.

Over the last four years, Zdzislaw has experimented with and modified his strategy to maximize impact on consumer behavior. When he returned to Poland after twelve years in Norway working on environmental risk analysis at the Geotechnical Institute, he began by contacting local environmental groups. He believed that, if environmental leaders could be convinced to change behavior in their own homes, they in turn would influence people in their neighborhoods and workplaces. He organized meetings led by these leaders, and conducted surveys of household resource consumption. In the end, Zdzislaw was not satisfied with the resulting changes--the impact was not great enough. He realized that he needed support from local city governments in order to give the program a larger sphere of influence and more local support. It took him two years to redesign his model and begin the community workshops program.

In the mean time, he received hundreds of letters, mainly from teenagers who wanted to join his groups, in response to press coverage of his efforts. He gave up his work with older environmentalists (aged 50-60) because he says that they lacked trust in themselves as a consequence of their socialization under communist rule. He decided to concentrate his energies on young people--primary and secondary school children, High School and university students. Just as an example, he received 800 letters from young people asking for help in recycling and conserving following a series of articles about his program that appeared in a youth magazine.

In response, one of the things he did was write and publish a manual for teachers which was sent to 180 schools. From a marketing point of view, it was a great success and many schools implemented his action program. He discovered, however, that text was not enough--he needed training programs oriented toward practice. He decided, therefore, to concentrate on four large, urban municipalities. The criteria for choosing a specific urban area were: 1) partnership support from municipality and utility companies, 2) the existence of important environmental leaders who would participate in the project.

One example of his work in schools can be seen in Sopot, where he has established "eco-teams" of 13 to 17-year-olds who study an integrated environmental action program that he has designed. An emphasis on the environment has been integrated into biology, chemistry and even language and social science courses. Most importantly, these students are encouraged to become catalysts of change in their own households--to focus on daily habits they can help reform. After completion of a half-year concentrated course, students receive a special diploma which reinforces their status as changemakers. More generally, Zdzislaw encourages teamwork and student initiative. He encourages such activities as situational role playing: for instance, a waste disposal company wants to pollute while an active citizen's organization represents a different perspective. Students are encouraged to discover their own solutions and compromises, and to learn what is at stake in these decisions.

Zdzislaw's organization (the Global Action Plan Foundation) trains teachers in the above methods, and he now has over 60 support coaches working to implement his curricula and methodology in schools throughout Poland. His school program often also yields unexpected consequences for other aspects of his model. For example, young people themselves arrived at the idea that it is they who should invite people from their neighborhoods to attend group meetings and participate in local environmental actions. This has been extremely effective in improving attendance and mobilizing neighborhood activity.

Outside of the schools (as mentioned above), Zdzislaw also works actively in the community. An increasingly important component of Zdzislaw's strategy and methodology involves encouraging and facilitating the formation of a "vision" for the development of local communities. Zdzislaw organizes "vision workshops" for civil servants, local politicians, social leaders and environmentalists. In these workshops, people are challenged to imagine how they would like to see their community in the near and distant future. "If people don't know where they want to go," says Zdzislaw, "they'll never understand or take the appropriate steps to get there." After one such session, the 60 participants suggested that the mayor of Warsaw appoint someone to mediate between municipalities and inhabitants. And the mayor agreed! Zdzislaw has negotiated contracts with three municipalities to run his programs, and they have agreed pay 50 percent of the costs. Additional costs are covered by, among others, the U.S. Embassy, German Marshall Fund and the Environmental Partnership.

Other community workshops are also held for households not active in community reform. Students help organize these, and their focus in on daily living. The groups especially target spouses who stay at home and discuss alternative cleaning equipment and energy saving methods.

An additional part of Zdzislaw's strategy involves the publication and distribution of 800 copies of a quarterly bulletin. The bulletin is designed to invite people to participate in concrete actions and, in following pages, to describe successes in getting cities to implement his methods. The bulletin also includes advertisements for environment-friendly products, which are paid for by producers. The revenue from these ads helps support his operations.

Zdzislaw has already begun to broaden his project's influence in several ways. His next important targets include offices and businesses. First, he is planning to publish a manual for offices on how they can manage more efficiently from an environmental standpoint. He is also writing a guidebook on composting for schools, public offices and neighborhoods. Second, he is concentrating his work on public utility companies whom he views as natural partners in his conservation efforts. These have been extremely receptive to his ideas and in one case, after listening and being impressed with his creative ideas, a waste disposal official was inspired to invite all local environmental groups to a public discussion. Finally, Zdzislaw wants to change the way environmental organizations work in Poland. He says that they preach too much and criticize without offering constructive alternatives, and through meetings with their management and discussions of his hands-on training techniques, he hopes to begin changing their methods. Through all of these means, he wants to empower consumers to act and promote the construction of a real vision for future urban development in Poland.

In autumn of 1998, Zdzislaw started to expand the program. In 1999, he wants to have 800 households involved in 10 chapters in Poland; in 2003, 8,000 households in 40 chapters; and in 2008, 80,000 households in 70 chapters.

Zdzislaw was always active as a student, organizing concerts and international summer camps, and establishing a UNESCO Club. In 1982, he was forced to emigrate due to political repression and worked at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute. Here he became strongly aware of the impact consumers have on the environment. After 1989, his Institute was asked to help Poland solve two crucial environmental problems: 1) cleaning up the toxic catastrophes that were Russian military bases, 2) helping to clean up environmental pollution around petrol stations.

Zdzislaw saw the desperate need in his country for his expertise and returned in 1994. He believed that individuals could make a great difference in Poland after 1989. He says, "I finally had the power to create my own reality in Poland and show others the path, but I knew I couldn't do it alone." Soon after emigrating to Norway, Zdzislaw had considered studying to become a medical doctor. Today he says, "I wanted to become a doctor to heal the sick. I have become a doctor, in a way--the patient I am trying to heal now is the Polish local community and environment."