I was offhandedly reading this post, which talked about Earth Hour, and about hating on SUVs:
Also thinking of a nice, simple mass-action for discouraging the SUV-ites. Simple, direct; when you see someone driving an SUV, slowly shake your head in disappointment and disgust at the stupidity of the driver. Throw in a disgusted sneer and snort if you like. It’s not necessarily the driver that you’re targeting, the people around you are probably more likely to affect purchasing decisions.
Well, a rather pedestrian level of hate as environmental discussions go.
I hate SUVs too. There’s a very small number of people who have good reason to own an SUV. Everyone else should own a normal car or a minivan (more practical in all the ways that matter, it just doesn’t look as cool). OK, the irony is that the minivan isn’t going to be much more efficient, it’s just that I’ll trust you have good reason to own a big vehicle, because you’ll have weighed the utility against the supreme uncoolness of a minivan. And anyway, four people barreling down the highway in a minivan is more efficient than one person in a Prius. With an SUV I’ll always suspect vanity. And what’s worse, I won’t think less of you just because of the resources you take up (not just carbon, but street space, visual, impact, etc)… I’ll also think less of you because I’ll have you pegged as a dumb consumer. And don’t give me any bullshit about getting around in the snow — then I’ll just peg you as a lousy driver, because I’ve been driving out of snow drifts in crappy low-clearance underpowered cars all my life without much trouble.
But I digress. Yeah, SUVs are shit. So what does it matter if I think so? I can only not buy an SUV so many times. If I don’t buy a million SUVs will I have saved the world? No. So, like Mike I wish I could get other people not to buy SUVs. I’ve considered tagging SUVs with these bumper stickers, but I dunno. Will I do anything more than piss some people off? If I make some soccer-mom type feel guilty, will I have actually accomplished anything? I think she’s a stupid consumer, and probably self-centered in her choice, but do I actually want that person to feel bad, or mad, or unjustly accused? The only outcome I can think of is some negative reaction, and maybe that reaction could be productive. But probably not.
The idea really fell apart as I reflected on all the Hispanic people in their SUVs going to the Catholic church next door, and realized that if I tagged one of their SUVs it would probably be even more pointless. This was their symbol of success, and you certainly can’t fault them for getting a big vehicle if they are filling it up, even if their particular choice of SUV was just a reflection of cowboy dreams — but when they bought the SUV instead of the minivan they only wasted some money, they didn’t really do any worse for the world.
But getting beyond the particulars of SUVs, I feel environmentalism has a real problem. It is built on guilt. A NIMBY action, or maybe land conservation, can actually be explained as rational direct action. Personal effort can result in the improvement of your personal space. But global warming? Personal action doesn’t do anything, it can’t do anything. All we have is guilt, a sense of collective responsibility, fear over some collective doom.
Guilt is a crappy foundation for a movement. One thing our commercial and consumerist world has going for it: there’s no guilt. The salesman won’t question why you are buying something. It’s always "thank you sir, have a nice day!" And even though sophisticated people will mock the insincerity of the expression, we’re still human and a kind word and a smile still makes us feel better, no matter how our rational mind rejects it.
But environmentalism? The most common reactions to guilt are avoidance, procrastination, resentment. Guilt is a horrible way to achieve action. Judgment can be a way to build group identity, and environmentalism has achieved this. It means something to be an "environmentalist". But that’s hardly the goal, is it?
People want to do the right thing for the world. They want to stop global warming, they want to reduce pollution, save wildlife, all that stuff. All the surveys show this. We’re not going to get any closer to consensus (on goals) than we are already. If we, collectively and individually, are still not doing what we need to, then it is not for lack of a collective desire, or even a lack of education.
So how do we turn desire into action? I don’t think guilt is a good way to do it. I’m not sure I like that path anyway. Is it an irrational reaction to guilt that we try to avoid judgment? Is it irrational that people are drawn to an environment where they are told they are good, where they are accepted, where they can act to achieve clear goals (even if that is just a purchase), where they can succeed? Consumerism may only draw people to an unimpressive local maximum of happiness, but it always makes the pursuit clear, consumerism draws you forward, consumerism offers a clear path.
And even if you choose to accept and respond to the guilt of environmentalism, it won’t stop. First you turn the water off while you are brushing your teeth. Then you get rid of the SUV. You replace your bulbs with CFLs. Are you ready to get rid of your drier? Put your thermostat at 60F? Eat organic? Stop eating meat? Join or start a co-op? Get a composting toilet? Go off the grid? There’s always more to be done, there’s always another thing to feel guilty about not doing. It’s disheartening.
Is there a way environmentalism can be less depressing? Less guilt-driven? Less accusing and judgmental? Can environmentalism be less dismal, more happy? Environmentalism is trying to drive a wedge between what people want and what they do. Putting aside moral arguments, is this an effective way to make change?
Considering my carbon footprint has only made this worse. Every action is negative. Everything I do has a cost. Pursuing carbon neutrality feels like a pursuit of non-existence. People are questioning the growth imperative, but at least growth has a certain excitement to it. Do we step into the future with confidence or fear? Do we take each step with trepidation and dread? What a horrible way to come into contact with our future selves! I want to meet all of our future selves with arms open. Buying shit is a poor substitute for that optimism. But dammit, I want to be optimistic. I don’t want to just be guilty.
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I prescribe a daily dose of Copenhagen Girls on Bikes until the SUV-hate subsides.
I feel the same way. I often feel bad about taking bags from the store that I know will just go in the garbage when I get home or buying new things because I know I’ll have to throw them away sometime.
But if you didn’t buy anything because you knew you would have to throw it away then you wouldn’t be able to buy anything.
Perhaps you just need to find a balance. And cut out the things you don’t need or use. Just don’t buy something that you don’t really need for a specific purpose and if you do need it justify buying it with the fact that you simply need it for a specific purpose. This way you won’t feel guilty about buying the new thing because you either didn’t buy it or you had a reason to buy it.
Reduce,reuse,recycle doesn’t necessarily mean Stop,Don’t use,Don’t buy.
Sounds like someone needs a dose of http://www.worldchanging.com :-)
I never really understood the SUV-hate. First of all there are different SUVs. Some are basically trucks, some are basically regular cars with a fancy body. Are we hating the body shape here or what? Is it okay to own a truck just for its “tough” image then? :-) Is minivan really so much better at aerodynamics? :-)
To answer your question about putting the thermostat at 60F: just say no. If I put it at 60F here in Texas I’ll go bankrupt over my air conditioner and burn a lot of fossil fuel in the process. You have to be reasonable. ;-)
Regarding the ecoguilt. Some of my friends telling me that the best cure for that is to ship yourself to some Third World country with a cheap simple living where the climate is forgiving so you don’t need to worry about thermostats and their settings. Apparently the other option is being guilty. ;-)
I surely hope that the world can be saved without riding the guilt train. It just needs to be cheaper to do the right thing than wasting resources. A while ago, I’ve read some interesting book: http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Exposing-Poor-Decent/dp/0345494016/ref=pdbbssr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207037268&sr=8-1 (it’s a bit similar to Freaconomics). There’s a chapter on ‘crosstown traffic’ which discusses traffic, pollution, environment, etc. The solution: pricing should reflect the damage. There’s certainly much more to say about this, but I believe that a swift behaviour change is easier done by economic means than by moral ones.
Fix the world or you will die.
Pretty easy choice :)
I personnally find much excitment in discovering new ways of making better things with less energy eg : [vermicompost](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermicompost), [Super Adobe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Adobe)
I think the solution is not making people guilty but making new models emerges as [jamendo](http://www.jamendo.com) or [magnatune](http://www.magnatune.com) are trying to do for music.
> There’s a very small number of people who have good reason to own an SUV. > Everyone else should own a normal car or a minivan (more practical in all > the ways that matter, it just doesn’t look as cool).
Uh, not really. Everyone should try /not/ to own a car at all. The ideal goal should be able to walk everywhere you need to go (live close to your workplace, your shopping district etc). Failing that, public transport should be you first thought before you even think about owning a car…
This is the beginning of fascism where elitist thinkers know what is “best” for you and the state is their weapon to wield the power necessary to enact their designs. The height of arrogance is that we need to “save” the planet. There is a human impulse to impose the will of one individual over another and saving the planet is just the latest excuse and the anger people feel is that their supreme intelligence in their grand plans to orchestrate humanity are not accepted without question.
Why does your argument fall apart over Hispanics driving to church in SUVs and that being a status symbol for them? Do you honestly think that they only drive those vehicles to church? My guess is that mom/dad use it to drive to work all by themselves just like everyone else.
I would argue that instead your argument falls apart over the fact that outrage over defamation of property always beats guilt. I think that attaching those bumper stickers would, except for the odd exception do nothing but trigger a backlash in the target.
As for the environment and getting greener, we are seeing more positive trends. Being green has entered the mainstream and is becoming a style. My friends are ridding themselves of the giant SUVs I lambasted them for years and going with more reasonable vehicles. Not over guilt, but because its now stylish and marketing targets them now to be green.
As for me, I do my part. I’m a cyclist or use mass transit. Fans and windows in the summer instead of air condition. Reuse bags from the grocery when I can.
“environmentalism has a real problem. It is built on guilt.”
It is not. Mainstream environmentalism looked the other way for the first decade of the ecologically unambiguous SUV fad, as Sierra Club benefactors cycled through one or two green (painted) Ford Explorers. Guilt is easily the least popular emotion in our culture and the movement has been afraid to project itself as a scold. It cheerfully suggests alternatives without committing to opposition of popular bad choices. And environmentalism has been, in term of results, an utter failure.
But that is changing, partly because environmentalism is facing competition from the right in a reborn conservation movement. The feel-good, pill popping, SUV driving, Limbaugh-boomers’ hijacking of conservatism is rightly losing its grip and the politics of responsibility (of which guilt is one cog in an ancient social machine) are in restoration. Together these ecologically conscious movements are beginning to recognize the wisdom of something that both left and right dislike for different, insufficient reasons: pollution-weighted consumption taxes. What happens at the point of sale is all that matters, as pointed out, and excluding from individual transactions our collective interest in keeping the biosphere alive is just stupid.
Doc: you misinterpret what I’m saying. There is an intellectual basis to environmentalism (which is the argument you seem to be trying to make), and I agree with that intellectual argument. But there is also the emotional basis to environmentalism, and in my experience this is built on guilt. Your accusatory words only serve to emphasize that. The contempt you express — a contempt which is sorely misplaced in this forum — is exactly the problem. What did you accomplish with that statement? I doubt you accomplished much of anything. It’s hardly like this is a forum for expressing love towards SUVs. I think your words are negative, not from a moral perspective but from a practical perspective, as your words lack effectiveness.
Daniel: I have a hard time making the same intellectual argument to a recent immigrant that I would to someone of greater (multi-generational) privilege. It doesn’t mean the facts are different (though realistically it’s likely that the environmental impact of that immigrant is far less, as vehicles are only a small part of our individual impact). These arguments are based on how we view ourselves in relation to the world, whether we view the larger world as a responsibility, whether we feel we can effect any real change, or if we think of the world simply as a context for our personal struggles and goals. For someone whose perceived circle of influence is just themselves and their family these arguments simply lack weight, regardless of whether the argument is correct.
Robin: no car at all? There are many people for whom this is not at all practical. For people with no children in a large metropolitan area with a sufficient choice of jobs, or a centrally located job (as would be the likely situation for someone working with computers), sure. These creeping expectations — first no SUV, then no car, and on and on — are part of what makes environmentalism so unsatisfying.
As the the more technological/modernist/market-driven suggestions, I agree ;) While some will make valid arguments that this is just a way to wait around for technology to fix the problem for us with no personal sacrifice, amid all the less-effective-than-necessary options (they all are less effective than is necessary) a technology-oriented perspective is at least more pleasant. (Well, personal anti-consumerism as a lifestyle choice can be fulfilling too, but not so much anti-other-people’s-consumerism)
I call bullshit.
You’re bemoaning the SUVs then fly out the Chicago for some meeting.
How much damage did you do to the environment? It is so typical to single out some other segment of population and blame them, when in fact you yourself are no better … only what you do must of course make sense
Replace your bulbs with CFL, or buy a Prius … heh another idiocy propagated by people like you. Are you aware that making the batteries for Prius does far more damage to the environment than a regular car in its entire lifetime? Are you aware that fluorescent light bulbs contain sufficient amount a mercury to be a health hazard? Companies push it because they are better for profit.
Toothy: who the hell are you calling bullshit on? Why so many useless rants?
I guess I set a bad precedence by starting with a rant, though I put it in so as to demonstrate the uselessness of these rants. But even then I have to admit an underlying desire to simply rant. Rants are emotionally satisfying, I guess. Stupid, but satisfying.
Nice blog.
“If I make some soccer-mom type feel guilty, will I have actually accomplished anything? I think she’s a stupid consumer, and probably self-centered in her choice, but do I actually want that person to feel bad, or mad, or unjustly accused?”
Not to worry, soccer-mom’s don’t feel guilt for long. Besides, they’d only go to the mall and buy something to assuage their guilt. :-)
At least you’re beginning to recognize that we live in a self-centered society with little regard for others whether they be people or nations. We’re mostly about meaningless gestures.
We’re friendly with an acquaintance that changed all their incans to CFLs, but they leave their lights on all the time even when they’re not home…
The assumption you make is below.
“People want to do the right thing for the world. They want to stop global warming, they want to reduce pollution, save wildlife, all that stuff. All the surveys show this.”
What none of the surveys ask is whether people are prepared to make the sacrifices (mostly they’re not). What people do are make the gestures that make them feel good. They’re not willing to change lifestyle or comfort (however trivial it may seem). Guilt won’t do it. Has to be something to make them feel good.
I’ve rented SUVs and quite frankly, I just don’t see the fascination with them. The family car works just fine. But then again, we don’t lead the same lifestyle. Most with SUVs around here are hauling boats – we don’t own one and are not interested. We’re a family of 5, but still see no need for an SUV, though we have been thinking of a minivan now that we drive home some neighbor’s kids from school in addition to our own.
Ian said: “For people with no children in a large metropolitan area with [...] a centrally located job [...], sure.”
I’ve got two daughters and a centrally located job, but I still bike to work (when I can, and take transit the rest of the time). Do I count?
I think that if more people were more interested in living without cars, it would be easier to live without cars. Of course, I also think it’s easier than people think already. A while ago, I read a book about someone who sold his car, and made due without one (taking cabs sometimes, transit sometimes, biking or walking sometimes, etc). His main point seemed to be that when you have a car you drive a lot of places by default, without thinking about it, but when you don’t have a car you think about how you will get where you need to go, and sometimes the answer ends up being “by car”, but it’s the thought that goes into it that’s the important thing.
He also said: “But global warming? Personal action doesn’t do anything, it can’t do anything.”
I’ve always thought that personal action was the cornerstone of getting anything done. I don’t think that I’m going to single-handedly save the planet by using CFLs and biking to work, but I think that people might see me doing it, and that it’s important to me, and maybe consider doing it themselves, and perhaps people will see them, and maybe it could snowball until enough people are doing enough to have an effect (affect? effect?). Or maybe not. Maybe I’m not making any difference, and the world will go to hell. In that case, I guess I consider my lifestyle training for living in a world with $2000/barrel oil. :)
Wait a moment, you can’t choose the motivation for a movement. You can choose the methods, you can choose the priorities, you can even choose the kind of cookies served at the local reunion. But you can’t change the motivation for a movement. period.
The motivation for environmentalism is not subjective, the planet is so contaminated that our children are going to have a rough future and our grandchildren may not even have a future, and everything we do contributes to it.
How we feel about it is subjective but the only sane responses to this fact are guilt, anger, fear and worry (or denial). There is no way around it. No we can’t turn this into a net positive unless we implant people with machines that induce little orgasms every time you recycle or take public transport.
This is not the only movement that suffers from this, loosing weight, reading books, helping the starving in the third world, people often do nothing towards these goals because they get discouraged, there is always more to do but we all agree that that is no reason to do nothing.
Actually I think all movements are based on negative feelings, if they weren’t, they would be hobbies, or sports. You don’t see a skydiving movement, you don’t see a home gardening movement.
No sugar coating on the issue will stick long enough, in the end everything boils down to the fact that we need to do make unpleasing sacrifices for long time rewards that aren’t actually rewards but keeping what we already have, which is lame, I know.
The key is of course in taking small steps forward, never backwards, and always pushing for more, what other way is there?
Ian, good to see you at PyCon.
I read a book review that sounded similar to your sentiments (“how can we make this work?”); the authors were trying to put forward a “New Environmentalism” (my google-fu is weak, as those words are popular). The idea was that the “old” environmentalism had peaked with the public by hyping every new crisis as terminal for the last fifty years. The new movement was to be based on sober tradeoffs in risk and utility. For instance I have never, ever heard a person who hates SUVs extol the virtues of driving a manual transmission. Manual cars are cheaper to buy which reflects fewer resources in their production and are also more fuel efficient which reflects fewer resources in operation. No one has or will demand fleet standards for manual transmissions because it inconveniences the wrong people (the old and frail can’t drive manuals) or because sticks aren’t radical enough.
The problem with existing environmentalists is that they come in two flavors: neither very helpful. First is the poseurs who drive Priuses and tsk-tsk their neighbors for not separating their recycling. I know several people of this type. One is a gal of modest means who spends endless time and water scrubbing her plastics and cans clean for recycling (if this can’t be inexpensive industrially than it is just expensive). I don’t know a Prius owner who is worth less than $10 Million. These folks consume fewer resources than Al Gore but not by much.
Second are the hard core environmentalists, the ones always in high dudgeon in the media. They don’t try to make converts as much as they try to make heretics and apostates of everyone else. They don’t want anything less than to rule. Combine the hectoring and the abide-or-die and you have a very poor strategy for getting greens elected. Both hard greens and hard socialists demand absolute control in order to make their policies effective but the difference is that the socialists promise to benefit people. Green policies are about punishing and controlling said heretics and apostates; no one ever asks if we could build nuclear power plants to capture and sequester CO2. And nowhere do they mention the enormous American tradition of private conservation of lands.
My lifestyle is quite tame but it doesn’t appeal to either the poseurs or the fascists. I drive a 10 year old big Saab sedan that gets 30MPG. Three years ago when I bought it I could have spent $13k more to buy a Prius but there is no way I could put enough gas through the Prius before it died to justify the extra resources (adults measure resources in dollars). I buy local beer. I buy local veggies when they are in season – not because I’m green but because I’m a veggie snob (I unloaded veggie trucks as a teenager. Plus you local greens are both cheaper and tastier).
In closing there is nothing from any face of the environmentalist movement for me to like. Some people care about appearances and not results. The other set care about control and not results.
About personnal action vs global action, I think that global actions won’t come without personnal action. There have to be pionneers, people who proves it can works, help determine good objectives before on can take more global move, and those pionners may continue even after as yeast in bread. Refactoring society is better than restarting from scratch. Of course that means that local change have to support the “be tolerant in what you receive, precise in what you give” :-)
About guilt, I think we’d better try to bring people to consciense. This conscience may bring up some guilt, but this is more the consequence of previous behaviour.
About “there’s alaways more to do”, you can have this problem with quite everythink in life, but as goes a french saying “the best is good’s enemy”.
Why on earth does everyone accept this global warming nonsense without a single shred of ya know actual proof beyond computer models and 60 years of temperatures? There is no falsifiable evidence whatsoever that we are causing any change in temperatures. There are plenty of computer models, intersecting data(which isn’t causation) and hand-waving but no science behind any of it.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020207.htm http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=22942 http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basic+Greenhouse+Equations+Totally+Wrong/article10973.htm
Its fairly amazing hubris to believe that driving a car down the street will destroy the planet. I think Americans are watching too many movies.
There is far more data to suggest that C02 increases due to heating up, not the other way around. That might explain why its getting warmer on Mars and there are no SUVs there.
30 years ago it was global cooling, now the doom is global warming. Its all about control and nothing more.
One picture I like is this. The earth is like a truck rapidly approaching a chasm. Environmentalists come in two flavours – those who attempt to hit the breaks as hard as possible, and those who try another approach, namely to “jam your foot on the pedal and see if you can just jump across”. I wholehartedly recommend [the article](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fafactspecter?currentPage=all) I found this in.
Great point. Guilty does not lead anyone anywhere. I have my own way to take it, which works for me, but (unfortunately) is also very difficult for other people to follow. It’s based on three principles: efficiency, balance and pace.
For me, the main reason to go the environmental way is the search for efficiency. Nature, despite all its redundancy and idiosyncrasies is surprisingly efficient. The universe is one big optimization machine. If I eat meat, and meat takes way more energy to be produced than it gives me, then it’s clearly inefficient. Can I do better eating veggies instead of meat? Probably. But I also need some meat, our bodies were built to use it too. That’s when balance comes into play.
If you strive to live more efficiently, there’s always more to be done, but there’s no guilt about it. There’s always a challenge, and that’s motivating. But that challenge can be disheartening, if it seems to be impossible. To balance this continuous challenge, another principle is needed, and that’s how to pace your time. The universe is eternal. You’re not. You’ve got a finite time to live, and in this time, you’ve got to take one challenge at a time. So I may stop eating meat today, and stop driving a car for short distances tomorrow. The actual order and dates do not matter, what matter is the commitment for continuous improvement.
That’s what I doing for the past few years. I still eat meat, and eventually I go to a barbecue party, but I reduced my daily consumption a lot. I own a small. I keep things such as aluminum, glass and paper separate from the organic trash, and give them to recycling folks from time to time (note: in Brazil some people make a living out of recycling). That’s working for me. It’s not about guilty, it’s about modesty, about being part of a world bigger than me, and trying to do my part as efficiently as possible… while still being me.
A huge factor in your experience is going to be the people in your life, and the choices they make. When you’re the only person you know who’s composting or biking everywhere, it would be weird not to be questioning your choices. But if your family, friends, and coworkers are more or less on the same wavelength, it’s just not as much of an issue.
Ian I had no trouble interpreting your post and I hate to sorely misplace contempt in anyone’s forum, but in this case I thought my contempt for environmentalism as a movement that is petrified by its fear of being a scold was a ready contrast to your view of it as being built upon guilt. (Maybe it’s built on guilt, but it’s “in denial”?) I suppose I hoped to accomplish the same thing anyone hopes to accomplish in posting words to the internet, to have one’s point heard, and I’m sorry that you have such a dim view of their effectiveness.
You suggested my attitude proved your point, but to do that my opinions would have to be characteristic of mainstream environmentalism in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. (Am I reading “built on” too literally?) I don’t even represent environmentalism of this decade, or call myself an environmentalist in the first place.
The environmentalism that I have seen in inaction is built on empty promises, hopeful imagery of pandas and celebrity causes. It has steadfastly avoided criticism of individual decisions—guilt—and peddled a soft politics of awareness and fundraising. As this amounted to nothing, frustrated environmentalists formed their own harsher views outside the mainstream. The post you quoted suggests recruiting 300 “environmentalists” to ceremonially dismantle an SUV. But I would counter that, if you selected 300 Americans at random who called themselves environmentalists, very few of in this cross-section of the movement would be willing to participate in such barbary. (Thank goodness!)
Though environmentalism’s radical fringe has become more prominent, the message at the center of the movement has not budged. No changes is lifestyle will be required, just remember to turn off the lights when you leave and send in those Sierra Club dues. It’s not that I think advertising guilt would be effective: absolutely not. But there are ways to trasform “guilt” (recognition of the negative) into action. Unfortunately for environmentalism, the best tools for doing so are offensive to the socialism it finds itself intertwined with. Without those constraints you can promote conservation and make alternative energy competitive by pricing up negative impacts. You aren’t lamely asking people to feel guilty, you’re replacing guilt with a cost in dollars they will most definitely feel and act on.
The Catholic Church (and lots of other churches coming from the Middle-East) is built on guilt. That worked quite well for 2000+ years. Every movement has to specify a set of rules, a way of discriminating between “us” and “them”, and if you break those rules you will feel guilty; open-source, for example, can make you feel guilty whenever you use Windows. That’s fine, that’s part of the game.
The problem for environmentalism is another: whatever you choose to believe, the hard truth is that domestic consumption is the smallest factor of the equation, completely irrelevant for the scale of the problem. Driving a hybrid to work, using different lightbulbs and recycling all your domestic waste will not change anything at all, even if it’s done by everyone in the world. The only factor that matters is economic activity: your fleet of trucks, the ships bringing your products back and forth from Asia, the robots assemblying them, the hundreds of computers you turn on at least 8 hours a day to design them, the lights of your thousands of offices… Until you radically change this infrastructure, “talking green” is just a waste of time.
I won’t attempt to address any of the comment threads here, but I will point out that the Viridian Design movement is devising and promoting positive motivations for environmentalism. Worldchanging.org (already mentioned above) is a great place to get your fix, as are the following sites:
http://www.treehugger.com/
http://www.inhabitat.com/
http://sustainabledesignupdate.com/
http://www.hugg.com/
Environmentalism needn’t be guilt-based at all.
I know what you mean. I bang the global warming drum for a hobby and think about it for a living.
I come to PyCon to be around optimists. I don’t know where I’d be without having a community of creative and optimistic people as a role model.
A problem comes up when Pythonistas ask me what I do. Whether they’re of the “what about global warming on Mars, buddy, huh? huh?”school or not, the conversation always ends up depressing. I think I’m just going to say I’m a geophysicist. I study, um, coral depositions, that’s the ticket. It’s dull. Let’s talk about whether we understand what the heck Ian Bicking is going on about this week, instead. Isn’t Python amazing?
It’s hard to know how to sell bad news. The fact is that the future holds a lot of risks, and a believable model of how we’re going to conduct ourselves under the new circumstances hasn’t emerged.
The sort of optimism where we would all be better off if everybody changed everything about themselves just isn’t realistic. I’m old enough that I’ve been through that one before. We really believed we’d change the world, rearrange the world. What ended up happening is our legacy is Starbucks, Apple, Dreamworks. All great stuff, all better than went before, but only mind changing, not world changing, pretty much world leaving exactly the same way it was before-ing actually.
What we need, ideally, isn’t guilt, and it isn’t a new philosophy either. Neither of those scales well.
We need it to be fun to live lightly on the earth. We need it to be un-fun to have an SUV. We need it to be a hoot to have a seven dollar monthly energy expenditure.
Unfortunately, the hour is getting very late and what we need might not be what we get. It might not even be possible.
If we’re going to get out of this century intact the only way is through a huge shift in politics. Maybe that could be fun, but it’s hard to see it right now.
Aren’t Python metaclasses cool, though?
I know this might put me in a minority, but I am skeptical that an SUV is the best target to enact environmental change. On one hand it is one of the easiest targets to attack though. I guess I more more worried about the same questions that Donald Knuth is worried about:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html
My favorite SUV bumper sticker is the one that says, “I support terrorism.”
I’ve found that MANY lefty or left-leaning orgs use guilt as their primary means of social engineering. It’s amazingly dumb. It just alienates people, or makes those who accept the dogma feel holier-than-thou towards everyone else, which guess-what? Alienates people even more.
This is one of the big reasons that I adopted the Slow Food movement as worthy of my volunteer time: It’s not guilt based.
They’re only nominally environmental (it’s a side effect of their core proposition) and aren’t transparently lefty (though the founder is a literal communist, politics are also not their core proposition). It’s a conservative manifesto with liberal secondary side effects. How cool is that?
The basic gist of the movement is that EVERYONE deserves good food. Rich, poor, even you. And when you dig in and work out what “good” means, you find that all kinds of secondary effects that are really good for us, the planet, local economies, the future, our culture… all of these things happen by accident.
And it’s not about “oh, I shouldn’t eat tuna — the dolphins” it’s about what I deserve. It’s about dignity and maybe entitlement… much better sales tools than guilt, IMO.
I haven’t worked out yet how to take this brilliant idea to other political activism.
It’s worse than that. Guilt driven enviornmentalism simply doesn’t work.
For starters we are really really bad at judging the carbon cost of a product. Think of all this crap about buying locally grown. It makes sense that locally grown would use less carbon but it all depends. Actually shipping on giant ships or moving by train is so carbon efficient that they are easily outweighed by the short distances and other choices when less efficient means is used. Worse, we have no real intuitive handle on how much carbon is used to make a computer or to create a piece of wood furniture and corporations who want to sell us things have an incentive to mislead us into thinking their product is more enviornmentally friendly than it truly is.
If this wasn’t bad enough consider the fact that by personally conserving you encourage someone else to pollute. Certainly in the short term (and perhaps now in the long term) gasoline has a fixed supply. Thus every gallon of gas I conserve lowers the price enough to convince someone else to use a gallon of gas. Even in the long term where in theory your conservation might encourage less future investment in refining and drilling you have to keep in mind that decreasing the demand for gas will still decrease the price and the other person who buys gas as a result will partially offset any conservation on your part. Worse, conservation as guilt encourages people to compare themselves to their neighbors and even useless acts that feel like they are saving CO2 work against support for real solutions (I do my part why should I pay more too).
Really though this shouldn’t bother us to much because the idea of environmentalism as personal conservation was a dumb one to begin with. It’s like responding to the fact that we would all like to own a porsche by deciding to have everyone conserve the time they spend driving a porsche so we can loan them out. Obviously driving a porsche or buying CO2 using products will be worth more to some than others and a better solution is to let those who get more benefit from it pay more for it and compensate the rest of us.
The only thing that we can do to really combat global warming is actual taxes on CO2 use. I don’t get why some people seem to think it needs to involve personal sacrifice when really what it needs to involve is societal sacrifice in the form of taxes (which can be made revenue neutral to offset any potential shifts in the tax burden). It’s really not that hard but with two nominees for president proposing a gas tax holiday that every economist agrees will be useless I don’t have much hope.
The constructive, good things on the planet are done and created by individuals ( it’s a misconception that groups do it, as a group is headed by an individual ). The solution to making a change is to have opinion leaders of each area set the precedent. Then promote this and back them up as much as possible.
The problem with your theory is that your actions affect me, my family, and my friends, and so I’m forced to care about the choices you make. :(
If we were all living in our own solitary environments, with no exchange beyond what we explicitly agreed to, then I would fully support your point of view, though.
And, just to argue your side of things: Unless you live near me, it probably doesn’t affect me that much. And last I heard global warming will increase the amount of farmable land in Canada by 25% or so, so I guess I should really be asking you to drive your SUV more, since it will benefit me.
(And yeah, as a Canadian, outlawing guns doesn’t seem that heinous to me. Feel free to dismiss the rest of my opinions based on that, if you want. ;)
Later, Blake.