I can hardly be the only person at Middlebury that has observed the unprecedented succession of extreme weather events, from the cataclysmic hurricanes in the Caribbean to the deadly floods in India and Sierra Leone, with a gnawing sense that the climate’s dreaded new normal is quickly arriving. I say gnawing, because anyone with a sufficient understanding of the problem knows that their daily lifestyle makes them complicit in it; indeed, as I boarded my carbon-spewing flight from wildfire-choked Oregon back to here, it was extremely apparent that even banal, seemingly apolitical acts of transit are inextricably linked to the greatest moral crisis of our age. In short, I am a hypocrite, and you probably are too.
Notice how simple, how natural it is to unleash personal value judgements around climate and sustainability, even self-deprecating ones. How can you claim to care about the planet when you don’t use LED light bulbs! Or an electric car? What, you don’t subsist on canned garden produce and solar hot water alone? When subjected to this kind of scrutiny, I suspect nearly all but the most dedicated and ascetically-minded come up short; in fact, to make oneself properly ‘sustainable’ to the extent necessary to reverse course on climate change is to embark on a daunting series of investments, changes to behavior, and general self-restraint, all within a society largely structured around the encouragement of ravenous consumption. When our collective, institutional misdirections are perceived as individual lapses in morality, it’s unsurprising that those sympathetic to environmental concerns feel guilty, and those unsympathetic or unknowledgable feel accused and attacked.
With this critique, I’m not trying to invalidate people’s individual contributions to sustainability as somehow pithy or useless. Nor am I trying to cast people attempting to live sustainably as judgmental. However, I think it is necessary that we not fall into the unproductive mindset that climate change can be solved on the individual level alone, that it is a problem stemming from individual choices, and that subsequent improvements in lifestyle alone will trickle up. For as long as we continue to structure our politics, career aspirations, technological solutions, and values on a faulty understanding of who and what is truly responsible, we will get nowhere.
I think it is first important to consider why exactly we see our personal lives as the arena in which the climate battle can be fought. The pronounced shift towards the glorification of the individual, so prevalent in modern Western society, one overbrimming with LinkedIn profiles and vainglorious celebrities, cannot be overlooked here. We humans have become increasingly atomized and alienated, both from the productive forces that provide our material needs and wants, and perhaps more importantly from the organizational capacity to direct society towards some preferred destination. This power has been deferred, as a matter of course, to private persons and organizations structured around the private creation and dissemination of profits. For the Middlebury student, it often seems that your best bet of ‘changing the world’ is getting a job that lets you do that (as if Gandhi had a 401k!). From that Randian morality comes not just ecocide, but also the cruel inefficiencies of America’s price-gouging health care system, or the nearly-universal corporate control of political parties and institutions made obvious in recent elections. The great irony is this pervasive myth of individual freedom, the ability to choose whatever, is an illusory one; sure, you can buy a can of Coke with your name on it, but it’s much harder to truly divest yourself from a climate-killing system. We, the economically fortunate, are given the opportunity to buy our way out of eco-guilt, through Teslas and solar panels, but this still leaves intact or even strengthens the overlapping networks of capital that has future trillions staked out on the extraction/production of oil, minerals, timber, beef, cars, etc. Thus we are forced to make do with the local and achievable, or the career; to assuage this guilt some found social enterprises, or become green lifestyle gurus, radical-minded journalists and academics, protest organizers, etc. In sum, we try to apply this fundamentally limited ethic of individual achievement, the crowning cultural innovation of capitalism, to solve its ultimate failure.
In order to really address the underlying causes of climate change, we must channel our individual guilt into condemnation of those forces that have arranged modern society so wastefully. Climate guilt, in the more judicial sense of the term, is far from equal. Last July, the UK’s Carbon Disclosure Project published a damning report showing that only 100 companies were responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988; naturally, oil companies like Exxon and Saudi Arabia’s Aramco topped the list. Garden and bike to work all you want, but these companies and their financial backers will stop at nothing to extract every drop of oil from the ground unless they are collectively, intentionally opposed. What is ecological is political, and vice versa. The main thing we should feel guilty about (I certainly do) is allowing ourselves to be continually strung along by these companies and their government representatives, instead of working actively to replace them. In future columns I will discuss more ideas for how and why this should occur (in a way that goes beyond regurgitating Bernie Sanders’ platform). The crowd campaigns and physical resistance against the companies that built the Dakota Access Pipeline was a good example of where to start, but we should strive to be more disruptive.
It is precisely those that are least responsible for carbon emissions, namely the poor and marginalized of the world, that are already suffering the most from its effects. And as long as global society is rooted in an individualized and private morality, rather than one of public solidarity and development, these people will never have the financial means to rebuild or relocate, let alone purchase a Tesla.
Tevan Goldberg is an environmental policy major from Astoria, Oregon.
