True, but…

I read this op-ed on NY Times the day it came out, but then lost track of it before I was able to post about it.  In it, the author talks about the futility, really, of individual eco-action.  Which is true, when you get right down to it.  But what is the point of being so combative about it?  The collective action the author touts has to begin with the individual.  So getting someone into the habit of recycling, or the habit of cycling to the grocery store, seems to me to be the first, tiny step towards getting them to support the kind of collective action or resolution that can effect real change.  My friend Andy and I argued about this frequently during the two years at Tufts - incrementalism vs. paradigm shift.  He was adamant that massive change is the only way that things can be fixed in time to avert catastrophe, and he is very likely right.  But who is more naive: the person who argues for incremental steps as being (without the impetus of catastrophe) the only steps likely to be able to be effected, even if they likely aren’t moving fast enough?  Or the person who argues that the only way forward is to make drastic changes and refuses to admit the validity of smaller steps, even though drastic changes are exceptionally unlikely to be acceptable to enough people to get democratic consensus behind them?  Can we expect someone to go straight from blithely driving a Hummer to voting for full-cost accounting to be enshrined in economic policy? 

I agree that full-cost accounting needs to be put into official policy, since self-interest does tend to be a much greater motivator than self-sacrifice (as the author says).  And that collective action is needed.  But rather than being dismissive of the things people do already, why not approach it from a good-first-step, encouraging point of view?  I don’t think that individual action is incompatible with the push for drastic change, nor do I think that it necessarily “distracts us from the need for collective action.”  We should reframe our individual actions as the first step in a marathon, rather than as the completion of a very short race, and rather than as a pointless waste of personal energy.  In general, we’re not very good with marathons; what we need more than hecklers is encouragement. 

I’m guessing that there are very few of us who can’t be dinged for hypocrisy on one point or another.  The amount of plane travel I do, for instance, does call into question my so-called environmentalism, something of which I am well aware and puzzle over a lot.  The fact that I am far from most of my family and friends and miss them all constantly is a major factor in my internal equation, although I know full well that that doesn’t account for all of my international flights.  It is, however, a factor, and one which would likely still lead me to take at least one international plane trip per year, even were full costs brought in.  Does that make me selfish?  Well, yes.  But frankly, I don’t know how else to reconcile some of the major conflicting aspects of my life.  I couldn’t help falling in love with an Englishman.  I can’t help that most of the rest of the people I love are scattered across the United States.  There is nowhere I could be that there wouldn’t be someone I was missing, terribly, somewhere else.  So I fly, and try to make up for my flights by choosing well in the rest of my life, as best as I can.  Even knowing that it’s not enough.  I’m not giving myself an out - I’m just saying that I have run up against a problem that I can’t solve, given who I am, and for which I have chosen a compromise that, like pretty much any decision, is open to criticism.

Full-cost accounting will shift people’s choices.  But it won’t mean that they always make choices that you’ll agree with; I’ll still fly.  So why not encourage good habits, however small in impact, which contribute something toward balancing out the selfish choices that will still be made?  Of course recycling is not a solution in itself.  Nor is cycling to the grocery store.  Nor is growing your own vegetables, or line-drying your laundry, or installing a low-flush toilet… or full-cost accounting.  It ALL contributes, however, to what will necessarily be a complicated solution to a complicated snarl of problems.  So why not reserve some praise for small actions?

Of course, the author that prompted this diatribe did, to be fair, finish up his op-ed by saying that his readers shouldn’t stop recycling.  He’s encouraging extra action.  So, really, he and I are saying the same thing.  We’re just saying it in different tones.