http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006975.html
Getting misunderstood by the New York Times is a strange experience: it’s a bit frustrating, but you have to still be kind of flattered that it happened at all.
So I certainly have a mixed emotions about the Times’ story today, Buying Into the Green Movement:
HERE’S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt. Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid. Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight— careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand — and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement. …
“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.
The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.
Actually, as i told Alex Williams (who, it should be noted, did an otherwise excellent job), I believe something quite different: that the genuine solution is not a matter of consumer choice at all.
There is no combination of purchasing decisions which will make the current affluent American lifestyle sustainable. You can’t shop your way to sustainability, as I’ve put it before. On a planet running up against so severe a set of deadlines — global warming, the extinction crisis, the poverty crisis, etc. — prosperity as currently delivered is frankly immoral, even when purchased with an eco-chic package.
That doesn’t mean that I think prosperity itself is wrong. Quite the opposite. Nor do I think we could talk people out of wanting prosperity if we tried — heck, I hope for a generous amount of prosperity myself, one day. But we need to redesign prosperity, using innovation, new thinking and new technologies to render it sustainable.
And here’s the essential break between lite green and bright green thinking: the reality is that the changes we must make are systemic changes. They involve large-scale transformations in the ways we plan our cities, manufacture goods, grow food, transport ourselves, and generate energy. They involve new international regulatory regimes, corporate strategies, industrial standards, tax systems and trading markets. If we want to change the world, we need to forge ourselves into the kinds of citizens who can effectively demand such things.
Dire practicality demands that we reject the privatization of responsibility. None of us can make this great transformation happen alone, and it removes pressure from our leaders to take needed steps when some suggest that the changes that need to be made in the world start with our personal choices. They don’t.
This is a point Williams does a fair job of representing:
For some, the very debate over how much difference they should try to make in their own lives is a distraction. They despair of individual consumers being responsible for saving the earth from climate change and want to see action from political leaders around the world.
Can strategic consumption be one of the tactics we use? Of course. But the power most of us can actually exert at the cash register is extremely limited. Far, far more important are our public lives: our roles as citizens, as change agents within our businesses, as advocates in our communities, as investors and philanthropists, as opinion leaders in general (and if you’re reading this site now, you are, however uncomfortable it may be, an opinion leader).
At the end of the Times piece, Williams quotes a pollster:
“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”
We all certainly hope he’s right, though we’re also very conscious here of both the limitations of polling and the gap between what people say that they want to see happen on the environment and what they end up doing — the 4/40 gap. But we need a lot more than greener postures — we need to change our thinking and the thinking of those around us. “Mindfulness” may not be anywhere near enough.
Over the next decade we need a real reckoning of the ecological limitations we face, a public commitment to redesign our civilization to produce widespread prosperity within those limits, collective visions of what such a sustainably prosperous (bright and green) future might look like and a whole lot of innovation on tools for building that future.
Because ultimately, it is only our progress towards building that future — not our intentions, sympathies or displays of concern — that matter. If we don’t move fast enough, we’ll simply be attending a global ecological collapse well-heeled and stylishly attired, watching the planet burn with a glass of organic champagne in hand.
