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Saving the Planet: You’re Doing it Wrong

by Jared

October 15, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Tagged: consumption, environmentalism

As The Rebel Sell discusses, protest has become (or always was?) a consumption pattern. In particular, boycotting and other abstinences are indistinguishable from positional goods. I receive social status when I don’t do certain things.

One of the most popular contemporary consumption patterns is to live a sustainable lifestyle. From recycling to gardening, these activities are obviously fashionable. The problem is that a few fashion-forward individuals are not enough to save the planet. In such a serious collective action problem, it is not enough to tell people that destroying the environment isn’t cool.

Most of the destruction is being done by corporations, which are not designed to follow individual fashion (although I gotta say, Starbucks is rocking those knee-high boots). People need to stop focusing identity-forming positional consumption, which separates people, and get together to change the system.

Even worse, environmentalists are against some of the very collective actions that have the most potential to save everything! I would happily campaign for intense urbanification and nuclear power, to name two.

Getting people to stop consuming stuff and start working together could require a complete overhaul of civil society, which is at least as daunting as reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels.

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1. Jack

   on October 16, 2009 at 12:00 am

   You should try giving up hope, it’s pretty good. You get an instant shot of happiness and a powerful lust for salmon. “I should eat all the salmon I can now”, I found myself thinking today, “so when they’re extinct in a couple of years I can reminisce about how good they used to taste.”

   Sure, there could be some new technology or way of organizing people that overthrows the old order and moves the species forward. But most likely it’ll be co-opted to sell people ironic t-shirts made in Chinese factories with no emission controls: “NuTopia? More like PooTopia.”

   I should be more positive. “Look on the bright side,” I am told. Okay.

   Maybe we’re here to eat the planet, not save it?

   [Admin: fixed "environmentalists are against some of the very collective actions" link.]

2. Jack

   on October 16, 2009 at 12:56 am

   That “environmentalists are against some of the very collective actions” link irks me, specifically two arguments:

   • A. We can’t grow all of our food organically so therefore we should grow none of it organically.
   • 2. We can only feed four billion people with an all-organic food programme.

   Briefly:

   • 1. This is an all-or-nothing fallacy. Clearly the current system works: “organic” is niche and premium, not egalitarian. Some of our food can be organic. Analogously, “not everyone can live in mansions therefore no one should live in mansions” is bogus (though as I was typing it I heard pleasant strains of The Internationale psychically wend from the keys to my ears). The CEO of Whole Foods wrote a WSJ op-ed attacking socialized medicine and quoting Margaret Thatcher. Organic food isn’t “by and for the people” — ’nuff said.
   • B. I thought we were supposed to be reducing the population, not trying to reach the theoretical maximum number of humans? I’m not saying we should starve people, but should we be going out of our way to cram twenty billion of us into the place? I’d rather have tomatoes that taste nice than a bunch more neighbors to complain about my Rock Band drumming. I guess that makes me anti-social.

   Plus, Silent Spring is one reason Westerners distrust food science — talk about missing the forest for the trees. We were told that spraying DDT all over the place was fine and then it turned out it totally wasn’t. So yeah, forgive me if I stop spraying DDT over the dinner table, avoid Coke Zero, and dodge animal genes in my vegetables all in one go. Would you update your pacemaker to a zero day version of Windows or would you wait for a service pack?

   And don’t give me that “we’ve been genetically modifying crops since the start of civilization” line either. I love rhetoric, and I can spot it. There’s a whole world of difference between cross-breeding different kinds of corn and making fluorescent bacon.

3. Jack

   on October 16, 2009 at 2:02 am

   Thank God for the point about centralized recycling! Personally, and this might be where you really begin to plumb the depths of my narcissistic iconoclasm, I don’t recycle because it’s a waste of my time*.

   See, I have the opposite ego problem to the one discussed in the article. I don’t get an ego boost from recycling — all it does is remind me how petty and rules-based everything is becoming (“Really? Now other people are making rules about my garbage? Really?“). My ego is offended by recycling, even though I understand its theoretical benefit. It’s a kind of “the sins of the fathers are being revisited on the sons, yea, unto the fourth generation” type thing to me. I didn’t ruin the planet, why do I have to sort the garbage?

   Best, centralized recycling trumping curbside totally justifies me: It turns out that I was right to be skeptical this whole time! But anyway, centralized recycling catches people like me in the act without imposing costs and rules on us — let’s do that one first, it seems most elegant.

   * Hedge: If it’s not a waste of my time I do recycle. But if I have a stack of collapsed boxes and a bunch of plastic containers, get to the bins, and then have to read a poorly-laid-out essay some building manager wrote about what kinds of cardboard I’m not allowed to put in whatever colored bin and what recyke number each kind of container has to be to go in whichever other color I’d rather just dumpster the lot and go back to having fun. I’m an ENFP!

4. Jack

   on October 16, 2009 at 2:10 am

   Finally:

   We live or die by our ability to come together as a species…

   Well, that’s the end of that.

5. Jack

   on October 16, 2009 at 3:08 am

   I’m compulsively posting, I have to stop, but a couple more things:

   First, that Forget Shorter Showers article tickes me.

   WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery [...], or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons [...] ? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”? [...] The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.

   This justifies my love of super-long, piping hot showers followed by tub soaks! And also golf.

   Second:

   The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

   Let’s look for options other that martyrdom, shall we? The real solution is to deprive corporations of their limitation of liability and fully reflect societal costs (like environmental and labor exploitation) in the tax structure, then spend the revenues on remediation. But, of course, that’ll never happen. The dude with the Messiah complex’s ominous “any option” might, indeed, be better.

   Last:

   [It] is not enough to tell people that destroying the environment isn’t cool.

   Haven’t you been watching Mad Men? Littering is the new environmentalism!

6. Jared

   on October 16, 2009 at 8:35 am

   The real solution is to deprive corporations of their limitation of liability and fully reflect societal costs (like environmental and labor exploitation) in the tax structure, then spend the revenues on remediation.

   I think we have to accept the real possibility that the actual costs plus the transaction costs could be so high as to make industry non-profitable.

   Also: get a blog.

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