Welcome to our first annual New Year’s resolution edition—celebrating your power to inspire sustainable change

Happy New Year! We’re starting a new tradition here at One Step This Week: for our first issue every January, we’ll kick off the year with our New Year’s resolution edition. There’s something magical about this moment—a fresh calendar, a sense of possibility, and people simultaneously imagining positive changes in their lives. We won’t pretend the world isn’t a troubled place—the headlines remind us daily. But One Step This Week exists to offer something different: a quiet space amid the noise where you can focus on changes within your reach. We invite you to think about your resolutions as both private promises to yourself, recorded in a journal, and public commitments to your community, practiced in real life. Don’t underestimate your power to change the world!

Gift giving illustration

The Community Pathway: When Your Actions Become Invitations

At Sustainable Practice, we talk about sustainability as a journey along seven pathways. The Community pathway focuses on building networks of people who practice environmental sustainability together. Because practices spread through communities like ripples across a pond, one of the most powerful things you can do for our Earth is simply to let other people see you doing something good.

Resolutions That Others Can See

What’s your practical environmental resolution for 2026? Here are some ideas to spark your imagination.

Walking to the corner store with a reusable bag or cycling to the coffee shop on a Saturday morning with a big smile? Your neighbors will notice! You’re demonstrating that it’s possible, practical, and maybe even enjoyable to get around without a car.

Make it visible and social: Wave to neighbors. Stop and chat. Give yourself plenty of time to let people see you arriving by foot or bike, relaxed and unhurried.

Start Front-Yard Composting

Backyard composting is wonderful, but front-yard composting starts conversations. When neighbors see you putting out a compost pail for a pick-up service, or collecting finished compost from your front yard, they get curious. “What’s that?” becomes “How do I start?” becomes another household diverting food waste from the landfill.

Make it visible: If you subscribe to a pick-up composting service, ask if they have a yard sign you can display so people know what you’re doing. If you’re an expert composter and gardener, put your finishing bin in your front yard. (This is the final stage of your compost when it completely decomposes into “black garden gold.”) When someone asks about it, offer to share a little home-made compost—it’s a great icebreaker.

Hang Your Laundry Outside

Clotheslines have been making a quiet comeback, and for good reason. Line-drying eliminates the energy your dryer consumes and helps your clothes last longer. More importantly, when you do it, you’re signaling that in your neighborhood, air-drying is acceptable.

Make it visible: If your neighborhood permits it, install a permanent clothesline where it can be seen. You might be surprised how many people enjoy seeing laundry being aired out in public.

Grow Food in Your Front Yard

Vegetable gardens are sprouting in front yards across the country, replacing ornamental lawns with tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. A front-yard garden invites questions, shares abundance, and shows neighbors that growing food is accessible—even in small spaces.

Make it visible: Plant near the sidewalk. Put up a small “help yourself” sign for extra herbs. Share seedlings and cuttings with neighbors.

Drive Electric (and Give Rides)

People who know an EV owner are significantly more likely to consider one themselves. If you drive an EV, you’re in a strong position to help your neighborhood become a healthier, cleaner, and quieter place to live. You don’t need to be pushy; just answering questions is enough.

Make it visible: Offer rides. Charge in your driveway, where neighbors can see it. When someone asks, “How do you like your EV?” have a story ready to share.

Why Approach-Oriented Resolutions Work Better

The above examples are just ideas to get you thinking. Resolutions are about how you plan to spend your time–a natural thing to consider when the sun turns the corner and a new year arrives. If you’re fortunate enough to have choices in your schedule, how do you want to care for our Earth?

Here’s good news for sustainability resolutions: doing something positive succeeds more often than avoiding something negative. A 2020 study in PLOS One found that approach-oriented goals (“I will eat more healthy plant-based meals”) had a 58.9% success rate compared to just 47.1% for avoidance goals (“I will avoid eating junk food”).

Walking to the farmer’s market, tending a compost pile, hanging sheets in the sunshine—you can view these as positive actions you choose because you love the Earth, rather than sacrifices of your personal time and convenience.

The New Habit Challenge

One more piece of behavioral observation to tuck into your pocket: for many people, new habits take about two months to stick. So give yourself grace. Assume you’ll forget to bike one day or neglect your compost pile for a week. Picture yourself just picking things back up when you notice you’ve stopped practicing what you intended to do. As the saying goes, “fall seven times, stand up eight.” That’s how to build resilience.

Find ways to keep practicing sustainability, and eventually your resolution will feel less like effort and more like just... what you do.

An Invitation

So here’s our invitation for 2026: Choose one sustainability practice that you can approach as a positive choice that makes you feel good, rather than a sacrifice of time that stresses you out. Make a private promise to yourself and a public commitment to your community. Be ready to keep trying, without expecting perfection right away, and to share your story if friends or neighbors ask what you’re doing.

You’re just one person making one small change. But your resolution isn’t just about you. Your actions make an impression on everyone around you—a confident demonstration that sustainable living is possible and already underway right in your neighborhood.

What love for our Earth will you make visible this year?

From all of us at Sustainable Practice, very best wishes for 2026 and beyond. We’re glad you’re with us on the journey to sustainability!

References and Resources

Social Contagion of Sustainable Behaviors

Why Solar Adoption Can Be Contagious (Yale Environment) https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/why-solar-adoption-can-be-contagious

Peer Effects on Solar Adoption (Bollinger & Gillingham) https://resources.environment.yale.edu/gillingham/BollingerGillingham_PeerEffectsSolar.pdf

Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aas8827

Resolution Success Research

A Large-Scale Experiment on New Year’s Resolutions (PLOS One) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7725288/

How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit? (European Journal of Social Psychology) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.674

Ideas for Practical Resolutions

Head Over Heels for Walking 101: Short Trips by Foot https://sustainablepractice.life/archive/2024-06-23-head-over-heels-for-walking-101-short-trips-by-foot.html

A Brief on Bicycling https://sustainablepractice.life/archive/2023-07-09-a-brief-on-bicycling.html

Composting 101: Outdoor Pile Method https://sustainablepractice.life/archive/2024-06-16-composting-101-outdoor-pile-method.html

Here’s the Advanced Composting Scoop https://sustainablepractice.life/archive/2024-06-02-heres-the-advanced-composting-scoop.html

Air It Out: Dry Smarter, Save Energy, Protect the Planet https://sustainablepractice.life/archive/2024-09-15-air-it-out-dry-smarter-save-energy-protect-the-planet.html

From Front Yard to Food Yard https://www.creativevegetablegardener.com/front-yard-to-food-yard/

Smart Moves: Your Guide to Earth-Friendly Transportation https://sustainablepractice.life/archive/2025-02-02-smart-moves-your-guide-to-earth-friendly-transportation.html

Charge Ahead: Drive into a Sustainable Future by Leasing or Buying an EV https://sustainablepractice.life/archive/2024-10-06-charge-ahead-drive-into-a-sustainable-future-by-leasing-or-buying-an-ev.html

More Resources from Sustainable Practice

Sustainable Practice, the publisher of Your Earth Share: Seven Pathways to Sustainable Living and Sustainable Practices: Your Handbook for Effective Action, provides essential and comprehensive science-based resources for sustainability practitioners at www.suspra.com.