An Illusion of Progress
High fives to Sale Kirkpatrick for writing this fantastic essay. It’s few years old, but pretty on point with my thoughts on the Live Earth fiasco (here and here. I found it when I was researching my thesis and meant to post it. Here is a great excerpt.
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. Take our crazy energy consumption. For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption – residential, by private car, and so on – is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution. I mean, sure, go ahead and live a responsible environmental life; recycle, compost, ride a push-bike; but do it because it is the right, moral thing to do – not because it’s going to save the planet.
If we really want to understand why this happened we have to ask ourselves another question: ‘Why is it that we seem willing to live with the threat of apocalypse rather than trying to seriously alter a world where consumption, of anything, is seen as unrelieved virtue, production, of anything, is regarded as a social and economic necessity, and more, of anything (like children or cars or chemicals or PhDs or golf courses or recycling centres), is unquestioningly accepted?’
The Ecologist is rad.
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August 20th, 2007 at 10:41 am
I’m glad you posted this. I had read this essay way back when but forgot about it. Derrick Jensen talks about this a lot too, about how the myth of individualism provides an easy rhetorical out for people who aren’t interested in change of any sort — or who wish to absolve the powerful from any responsibility.
“Well, YOU drive a car, don’t you? How can you bitch about SUVs and global warming. I don’t see YOU living in the woods like an aborigine. YOU are using resources, burning oil, killing fish by using hydro power …” it goes on and on, and it’s just so much bullshit, this all-or-nothing attitude.
Making changes at a personal level is a lot easier — and safer — than creating real change. It’s way easier to put compact fluorescents in the bathroom fixture than it is to blow up a dam. It’s a lot safer to stop eating meat than it is to stop a mountain lion hunt. But we ought not to fool ourselves into thinking that making those right choices as individuals is the same as revoking the “right” of corporations and governments to strip-mine the biosphere.