Reduce, Reuse, Revolution

Modern environmentalism is faith based.  The daily activities involved in "being green" - recycling your bottles, packing your lunch in reusable tuppleware, unplugging your cell phone charger, etc. - are like a kind of mantra, or prayer: something we do over and over again with a belief that our small individual actions will spur into motion some force much larger than ourselves.  In his article, "Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do It", Michael Maniates point out that there is little basis for this belief.

"The hard facts are these: If we sum up the easy, cost-effective, eco-efficiency measures we should all embrace, the best we get is a slowing of the growth of environmental damage."

Emulating the piety of the modern urban - sub-urban environmentalist doesn't cut it if our intentions are to actually change the way we impact the natural world.

This raises the question, if "being green" the way we see it today is not enough then what is enough?  What actions or changes do we have to make in our lives and our societies to meet our own needs without exchanging the health of the environment or the potential of future generations?  The truth is that "being green" seems to be easy because it fits in the existing systems of production and consumption.  For example, rather than making the exceedingly painful shift to a fully renewable energy economy we will instead encourage our population to turn the lights off when they depart for an evening out; rather than restructuring our cities and towns to be more walkable and bikeable we will ask people to buy Priuses.  Unfortunately it is the production-consumption system itself that is at the root or environmental degradation, and no amount of recycling will pull 7 billion people back from the brink.

The kind of changes we would need in order to see positive environmental change are, as Maniates calls them, fundamental.  Reducing our impact on the environment will mean reforming our agricultural system, overhauling our transportation systems, and most importantly of all, letting go of the doctrine of never-ending economic growth.  Fundamental changes like these amount to changing the rules of a game that has been in play since the Industrial Revolution.  Some people and societies are very good at this game, and for obvious reasons, would be annoyed if the rules suddenly changed.

There are powerful interest groups, and there is our own deep-seated, albeit supressed, aversion to unconfortable change that create extreme inertia.  It is inertia that is the true enemy to the environment, and by extension, to ourselves; and it is inertia that we will need to overcome to be true environmentalists.