Would any sane person think that dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler,
or that composting would have ended slavery
or brought about the eight-hour workday,
or that chopping wood and carrying water
would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons,
or that dancing around a fire
would have helped pass the Voting Rights Act of 1957
or the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
Then why now, with all the world at stake,
do so many people retreat into these
entirely personal “solutions”?
Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims
of a campaign of systematic misdirection.
Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset
have taught us to substitute acts of personal lifestyle choices
for organized political resistance.
The same is true for spiritual enlightenment.
This is not organized political resistance.
An Inconvenient Truth helped to raise consciousness
about global warming,
but did you notice that all of the solutions presented
had to do with personal consumption—
changing lightbulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—
and had nothing to do with shifting power
away from corporations
or stopping the growth economy
that is destroying the planet?
(Al Gore) “Each one of us is a cause of global warming,
but each of us can make choices to change that
with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive,
we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero."
But even if every person in the United States
did everything the movie suggested,
U.S. carbon emissions would fall
by only 22%,
and scientific consensus is that emissions
must be reduced by at least 75%
worldwide.
Or let’s talk water.
We so often hear that
the world is running out of water.
People are dying from lack of water,
rivers are dewatered from lack of water.
And while this is true,
we’re told that because of this,
we must take shorter showers.
But see the disconnect?
Because I take showers, I’m responsible
for drawing down aquifers?
Well, no.
More that 90% of the water used by humans
is used by agriculture and industry.
The remaining 10% is split
between municipalities
and actual living, breathing, individual humans.
Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water
as municipal human beings.
That’s insane.
People, both human people and fish people,
aren’t dying because the world
is running out of water.
They’re dying
because the water is being stolen.
Well, let’s talk energy.
Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well.
“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.
[He forgot the military.]
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."
Or let’s talk waste.
In 2005, per-capita
municipal waste production
(basically everything that’s put out at the curb)
in the United States was about 1,660 pounds.
Let’s say you’re a die-hard,
simple-living activist,
and you reduce this number to zero.
You recycle everything.
You bring cloth bags shopping.
You fix your toaster.
Your toes poke out of your old tennis shoes.
You’re not done yet, though.
Since municipal waste
includes not just residential waste,
but also waste from government offices
and businesses,
you march down to those offices,
waste reduction pamphlets in hand,
and convince them to cut down on their waste
enough to eliminate your share of it.
Well, I’ve got some bad news.
The municipal waste
accounts for only 3 percent
of total waste production
in the United States.
I want to be clear.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t live simply.
I live reasonably simply myself,
but I don’t pretend that not buying much,
or not driving much, or not having kids,
is a powerful political act,
or that it’s deeply revolutionary,
because it isn't.
Personal change does not equal social change.
So how, then,
and especially with all the world at stake,
have we come to accept
these utterly insufficient responses?
I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind.
A double bind is when you’re given
multiple options,
but no matter what option you choose,
you lose,
and withdrawal is not an option.
At this point it should be pretty easy
to recognize that every action
involving the industrial economy
is destructive,
and we shouldn’t pretend that
solar photovoltaics, for example,
exempt us from this.
They still require mining
and transportation infrastructures
at every point in the production process.
The same can be said
for every other so-called green technology.
If we choose option one—
if we avidly participate
in the industrial economy—
we may think in the short term we win
because we may accumulate wealth,
the marker of so-called success
in this culture.
But we lose,
because in so doing we give up our empathy,
our animal humanity.
And we really lose because
industrial civilization is killing the planet,
which means everyone loses.
If we choose the “alternative” option
of living more simply,
thus causing less harm,
but still not stopping the industrial economy
from killing the planet,
we may in the short term think we win
because we got to feel pure,
and we didn’t even have to give up
all of our empathy,
just enough to justify not stopping the horror,
but once again we really lose,
because industrial civilization
is killing the planet,
which means everyone still loses.
The third option,
acting decisively to stop the industrial economy,
is very scary for a number of reasons,
including but not restricted to the fact that
we’d lose some of the luxuries,
for example, electricity
to which we’ve grown very accustomed,
and the fact that those in power
might try to kill us if we seriously impede
their ability to exploit the world—
none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet.
Any option is a better option than a dead planet.
Besides being ineffective at causing
the sorts of changes necessary
stop this culture from killing the planet,
there are at least four other problems
with perceiving simple living as a political act
as opposed to living simply
because that’s what you want to do.
The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion
that humans inevitably harm their landbase.
Simple living as a political act
consists solely of harm reduction,
ignoring the fact that humans
can help the Earth as well as harm it.
We can rehabilitate streams,
we can get rid of noxious invasives,
we can remove dams,
we can disrupt a political system
tilted towards the rich
as well as an extractive economic system,
we can destroy the industrial economy
that is destroying the real, physical world.
The second problem,
and this is another big one,
is that it incorrectly assigns blame
to the individual, and most especially
to individuals who are particularly powerless,
instead of to those who actually wield power
in this system
and to the system itself.
The third problem
is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us
from citizens to consumers.
By accepting this redefinition,
we reduce our potential forms of resistance
to consuming and not consuming.
But citizens have a much wider range
of available resistance tactics,
including voting or not voting,
running for office, pamphleting, boycotting,
organizing, lobbying, protesting,
and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
we have the right to alter or abolish it.
The fourth problem
is that the endpoint of the logic
behind simple living as a political act
is suicide.
If every act within an industrial economy
is destructive,
and if we want to stop this destruction,
and if we are unwilling or unable to question,
much less destroy,
the intellectual, moral,
economic, and physical infrastructures
that cause every act
within an industrial economy
to be destructive,
then we can easily come to believe
that we will cause
the least destruction possible
if we are dead.
The good news is
that there are other options.
We can follow the examples of brave activists
who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—
Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia,
antebellum United States—
who did far more
than manifest a form of personal purity.
They actively opposed the injustices
that surrounded them.
We can follow the example
of those who remembered
that the role of an activist
is not to navigate systems
of oppressive power
with as much personal integrity
as possible,
but rather to confront
and take down those systems.
Let’s get to work.