A Reluctant Environmentalist

Recently, I was at a small art event attended by the usual gang of hippies, hipsters, activists, anarchists, crust-punks and the like. As part of the evening’s entertainment, a woman who had recently attended Al Gore's training camp dressed up in a polar bear costume and delivered a mediocre facsimile of Al’s Inconvenient Truth lecture. I have a very sensitive internal cheese-meter, and the groans inside my head were so loud I could barely hear the presentation.

I am what you might call a reluctant environmentalist. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who, despite believing the surge in attention to environmental issues is long overdue, nonetheless cringes at words and phrases like “environmentally friendly”, “green”, and “sustainable”. I hardly know what these terms mean anymore, if I ever did.

Environmental rhetoric makes me uncomfortable because it tends to come in one of three flavors – consumption-oriented, apocalyptic, and techno-enthusiastic – none of which quite suits my palate. Anyone who watches television, reads the newspaper, or surfs the internet can’t possibly have avoided being exposed to all three of these, sometimes all at once.

First, the apocalyptic message: The world is ending! Carbon is pollution! Take action now! Next, the consumption-oriented message: Saving the world is easy. All you have to do is buy some light bulbs and a hybrid car, dress your newborn in hemp, and everything will be fine. Oh, and don’t forget to buy local. Finally, the techno-enthusiastic: Eventually, our whole economy will be run on hydrogen, wind, and solar energy. It’s only a matter of time before technology steps in and saves the day.

When there is discussion of decreasing consumption rather than shifting it to different products and technologies, that discussion tends to be moralistic, self-righteous, and individualistic. But at the same time, the political projects on offer (e.g. the Kyoto Protocol and increasing fuel efficiency standards) are far too narrow and incremental to confront the enormity of the socio-ecological realities facing humanity.

I can’t embrace any of these strains of environmentalism largely because the vision of the future they seem to point to doesn’t look much different to me from the present – in which inequality both within and between countries is a pressing reality. And none of them provides an idea of the Good Life I can really get behind.

In some ways this is a problem of scale. I find it easy to support projects on the small scale and nearly impossible to imagine how they might result in larger change. I study the local food movement, and I work with a group that is trying to develop an urban eco-village. In both cases, I think the work is good, but it still leaves me frustrated. When people like Paul Hawken make the case that if everyone just keeps working on their little projects, that eventually system-wide change will result (as he does in the book Blessed Unrest, in which he calls environmentalism "the largest movement in the world"), I can’t help being deeply skeptical. On a personal level, I am finding it harder and harder to relate to people who care about the issues I care about. I don’t want to be a naysayer, but I can’t turn off the little voice in my head, the one that is constantly saying, “yeah, but what about--?”

I suppose what it comes down to is that in my heart of hearts, I am a radical. I do not believe that anything less than fundamental change in the relationships that support humanity – between people and each other and between people and nature – will produce desirable outcomes. I don’t believe we can protect nature without protecting each other and vice versa, because as Wendell Berry says “we live necessarily in and from nature.” And I don’t believe that everyone’s individual good works will add up to system-level change, no matter how good those works might be.

This past week I attended the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers. There is actually quite a strong tradition of radicalism within geography, and one of the best sessions I sat in was a panel discussion with some of the most prominent radical geographers. What I was struck with in this panel session was the difficulty that even these brilliant academics have getting beyond critical analysis and finding a lived praxis, a way of being in the world that embodies their theoretical understandings and beliefs. Clearly, I haven’t yet found mine either.