OPINIONS
“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” EMILY POLLOCK
tolls the planetary death knell: or, why our obsession with individual action is inhibiting a sustainable future JONAH LETOVSKY ASSOCIATE OPINIONS EDITOR
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This may sound counterintuitive, but that last time you picked up a piece of litter or chastised your friend for not recycling their water bottle? It helped ensure that our children will inherit a planet far, far worse off than our own. Before you write me off as a conspiracy theorist or climate denier, let me explain. Since the birth of modern environmentalism in the 1960’s and ‘70s, and especially since the end of the last decade, living an environmentally “responsible” lifestyle has dominated public discourse. As books like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and images of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch finally inspired fear in everyday North Americans, business leaders and politicians saw the need to respond. Overwhelmingly, that response was, and continues to be, “change your behaviour as an individual, and reduce your impact on the planet!” If only we shortened our showers, we were told, and recycled our pop bottles, and reused our plastic shopping bags, and turned off the lights when we left a room, we could solve the global environmental crisis. Well, after half a century, how is this rhetoric working for us? Greenhouse gas emissions are hundreds of partsper-million above the “safe” level of 350. Biodiversity is being lost at a rate on par with a sixth Great Extinction. The global nitrogen cycle has been so disrupted that great swathes of our oceans are now permanently lifeless. If global ice cap melting continues apace, global temperatures may very well rise by 3 or even 4 degrees by the end of the century. Not so well, I’d say. Not coincidentally, “living green” has risen in tandem with neoliberalism. Both ideologies advocate individual responsibility—and have simultaneously undermined collective responsibility. Our obsession with changing daily behaviour has obstructed the vastly greater need: to change the systemic way our
society operates. Here’s the problem with concentrating on reducing, reusing, and recycling: it rests the fate of the planet’s future on individual altruism. A solution to climate change, or pollution, or the garbage crisis, or the collapse of ocean life that depends entirely on your neighbour waking up in the morning in a good-enough mood that she decides to cycle to work instead of driving is no solution at all. She won’t always be in a good mood. As much as we hate to admit it, we as a species and a society are both selfish and idle—and it is unrealistic to expect individuals to change the way they live their lives for an intangible concept like the “environment”. Even more disastrously: buzzwords like “efficiency” and “conservation” have become ammunition for
remains an extraordinarily subsidized resource, and corporations continue to dump their waste into our atmosphere and ecosystems at the taxpayer’s expense. Freshwater crisis? It helps to reduce the length of our showers and not let the water run while shaving, but our populations continue to grow and we continue to fulfill our needs from inherently unsustainable sources. I could go on, through food production, energy, and transportation. It’s a never-ending list of sectors where the future of civilization currently depends on one person’s conscience—pretty risky business. Our systems need be built so that regardless of whether or not we decide to be selfless in our everyday life, our children and grandchildren will have a planet to prosper on.
Our obsession with changing daily behaviour has obstructed the vastly greater need: to change the systemic way our society operates. politicians and business leaders looking for an easy middle ground: a convenient way to assuage the demands of posterity (and environmentalists) without having to make any politically or financially expensive decisions. Real change will hurt energy monopolies and ask more from taxpayers—at least in the short term. Decision-makers have, to their own benefit, shifted the environmental burden from themselves onto the public. We’ve let them do it. And in response, the crisis has only worsened. The vast majority of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions come from manufacturing and transportation—you know, those gas-guzzlers that your parents drive. While it’s all well and good to name and shame those who drive Hummers and Escalades, real responsibility lies with governments that have allowed manufacturers to continue making gas-guzzlers. Gas
We should be pragmatic to achieve sustainability, and that will include gradual measures. Shortening shower lengths, separating paper from plastic, and turning down the air conditioning are all necessary first steps. But they will not get us there. As I write this, sitting in Starbucks, I can see a sign on their counter proudly declaring, “We have a new partner in reducing cup waste. You.” It’s an advertisement for a reusable porcelain coffee cup that customers can purchase. Sitting immediately below it is a huge basket full of plastic water bottles. Every person in the café is using the paper-plastic cup that the baristas provide. All of their food has been trucked here, and most of them have driven here. Individual green living is a false god, and it`s time to break free.