Forget Shorter Showers

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.