Reduce, reuse, recycle is no longer just a mantra. For the new wave of American environmentalists, it’s a fad. It’s banners touting vegetarianism, electric cars, and Everlane jackets spun from thirty-two water bottles. In the social dimension, it’s a ballot cast in the recent midterms, a small donation supporting girls in another country learn to read, a Facebook post about the latest IPCC update. And what all this amounts to is a movement of well-meaning neo-liberals trying to haul the world out of danger on toothpick levers.
Guilt is both the propulsion and the downfall of this movement. Educated and self-conscious, we act out of a personal responsibility towards saving the world, knowing that our lifestyles contribute toward its destruction. Yet guilt, unlike environmental collapse, is an issue too easily resolved. By making small lifestyle changes, we sleep a little more soundly at night, knowing that we did our part, and did it without sacrificing comfort and ease. Among the first to capitalize on this new and shallow obsession with environmentalism are consumer goods corporations––companies that mobilize consumers with the promise of saving the world; companies that, even without greenwashing, perpetuate the myth of green consumerism.
Certainly, the creation of markets around recycled products and closed-loop supply chains are important first steps towards an economy built on sustainable practices. Our inability, however, to see past the easy attraction of sustainable goods belies a capitulation to market forces that run contrary to sustainability. These market forces assume that infinite growth exists so long as markets remain flexible and technological progress robust –– hallmarks of green consumerism that have long been debunked in the classic 1972 Limits to Growth report. Choosing eco-efficiency in our systems and products, the authors argued, while necessary, cannot solve the pressures of increasing consumption in a finite world environment. In other words, nothing so easy could be so good.
Yet it is by rote that we resort to these meager, individual actions. We consciously avoid plastic bags, diligently compost, buy only fair-trade products, maybe half-heartedly try veganism. All the while, we despair that we fail to enact any visible impact. We hold our breath while watching the carbon dioxide PPM count, as if that might stop it from rising. Far from sweeping structural changes in society, we resort, dangerously, to simply making the correct choices in our everyday lives. But by believing these individual actions to be suitable absolutions of guilt, we sink deeper into it: by perpetuating the myth of infinite growth, we allows corporations to continue turning short-term profits at the cost of long-term human survival.
It’s not just the Unilevers or P&Gs of the world that are profiting from our guilt. Bolstered by this environmental fad, politicians raise themselves high on platforms touting sustainability, only to fail to deliver, hindered by slow progress, personal political agendas, and a resistance to action until faced by insurgent political rivals. If the problem with our politicians isn’t a failure to act, it’s the failure of acting. To garner political support or perhaps to divert attention from incompetency, superficial fixes are implemented to solve environmental problems that aren’t really problems. These non-fixes are enabled, in part by our reluctance to stay engaged with politics. By reducing our civic responsibility to the simple casting of a ballot at a crucial election, we prove ourselves unwilling to demand accountability and real action from our representatives. As deeply draining as sustained political engagement can be, absolving our guilt through the singular act of voting, like the act of purchasing a reusable straw, is not the answer to climate woes.
Perhaps out of frustration with our local governments, perhaps out of an inability to keep up with the push-and-pull of party drama, perhaps out of a growing cynicism, we’ve begun to look for other outlets for our social responsibility. Thus, in the face of institutional incompetence, bewildered by bureaucracy, intimidated by international interplay, we’ve turned to what we perceive as the only action available to slake our guilt: the supporting of non-partisan grassroots actors. Volunteer! Donate to an NGO of your choice! Share the campaign! But just like with the support of eco-efficiency in our systems and products, while these emergency measures are necessary, they can only be a temporary stopgap. And so we watch now in increasingly strange hope and dismay––having done our part, having campaigned and donated and protested and written op-eds and voted and eaten our vegan chicken––only to come to the realization that our individual guilty consciences do not a revolution make.
The reality is that despite the increasing urgency of action, it seems that there are no real options available to us, the general populace. We must act, whether out of fear, guilt, or moral imperative, but there appears to be a persistent gap between our individual actions and meaningful change.
In a debate with MIT’s Yossi Sheffi on November 1st this year, sustainability expert Andrew Winston said, “Climate is the perfectly designed problem for humans to fail at.” A succinct comment, surely, but a terrifying one: Winston implies that the solutions to climate change lie outside our ability to execute them. These solutions would ask humans to think long-term, to discount present values in favor of the far future, to work together despite our natural impulse to create in-out groups and despite our tendency to read a zero-sum game out of any shared situation. These solutions call for collective recognition of guilt and its absolution through cross-boundary collaboration and massive structural change. How, then, have we convinced ourselves that technology, good consumer choices, and uncoordinated social action could ever be enough?
It’s a quandary that comes from the roots of American environmentalism. American environmentalism has historically preferred working within the system over explicitly challenging the overarching political or social structure enabling environmental destruction. The rise of environmental justice in the 1980s, though promisingly defiant and demanding, was ultimately curbed in its mission by forces of individualism as promoted by Reagan’s administration. As Michael Maniates noted in his essay “Ride a Bike, Plant a Tree, Save the World?”, the Reagan administration established a laissez-faire doctrine of personal responsibility and corporate initiative for protecting the environment that continues today. This notion of a painless, zero-coercion, win-win path towards sustainability, bolstered by innovation, consumer choice, and minimal societal upheaval, is still the modern zeitgeist. It’s a fad; it’s a cruel paradox. We American environmentalists live in a system which confers all responsibility onto individuals but discourages coordinated political engagement.
What’s needed, then, is a movement that asks us to rethink our role in the system. Rather than working as individuals, we need to consider the larger communities that we are part of, physically, politically, industrially, and culturally. Within these frameworks, we need to search for opportunities to create a new way of thinking, one which weighs long-term prosperity over short-term profits and ease; one which does not trap us in guilt and inaction.
Surely one facet of this new socio-economic system is consumer pressure on industries to innovate, adopt green values, and develop sustainable supply chains. Necessarily, another facet is our participation in civil government and our support of NGOs. But much more broadly, this new way of thinking and behaving in society must incentivize the largest powers––academic institutions, multinational corporations, governments, and international governing bodies––to work collaboratively, rapidly, and with future generations in mind to provide solutions for the impending environmental crisis.
Perhaps the recent Google protests over sexual harassment in the workplace and the decision to sell services to the Pentagon can serve as something like inspiration. In both cases, a huge number of individual voices banded together to clash with entrenched power and cultural dynamics––and they were heard. Similarly, it will take a massive coordination of individual pressures on our stakeholding communities and institutions in order to transform the fad of American environmentalism into a bona fide movement. And it is our responsibility, not out of guilt but collective humanity, to each and every one of us undertake this task: saving the world.