At a recent workshop for the Alberta Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Toolkit project, we were discussing the simultaneous difficulty and importance of collective action.  One of the difficulties of collective action is that it’s difficult to measure.  Here’s a great example of what it could look like if you’re able to track this.

The graphic below is an example of what collective action can look like.  This was released by Epcor, showing water usage in Edmonton last February.  The green line shows water use on Saturday, February 27^th – a normal day.  The blue line shows water use on Sunday, February 28^th – the day of the Olympic gold medal men’s hockey game.  The annotations indicate milestones in the game.  Wow.  Just a slight difference between the two days.

What I love about this is that it clearly demonstrates that if a bunch of individuals act together (whether consciously or not), it can have a tremendous impact.  Now, if we could just find some data on the beer consumption that day…