CEOs, hip-hop dancers and biofuel farmers

When stripped of passions, ideologies and embellishments, environmentalism is fundamentally concerned with one fairly basic concept: limits. Whether it takes the form of slowing consumption of finite fossil fuel resources, achieving ideal population size or maintaining the range of planetary conditions in which ecosystems can thrive, the overarching goal of environmentalists everywhere is the pursuit of a human experience that is contained within naturally occurring constraints; within limits dictated not by political, socio-cultural or economic systems, but by the chaos and complexity of our planetary one.

But in all our discussion of limits, environmentalists have largely failed to acknowledge the greatest limitation of all: the environmental movement’s failure to unilaterally deliver solutions to problems faced today. We haven’t yet fully embraced the idea that renegotiating our relationship with the planet will demand universal participation; that restructuring channels of production and consumption will require infinite diversity of perspective and experience.

We need corporate CEOs and hip-hop dancers and biofuel farmers. We need medical practitioners and pre-school teachers and mail deliverers and coal miners. We need children and parents and grandparents; liberals and conservatives; anarchists and civil servants. We need every race, ethnicity, religion and indigenous group under the sun, and of every kind of physical ability, sexual preference and cosmic perspective. And we need them to come together as they never have before.

This profound need for coalescence stems of course from the imperative we currently face to de-carbonize society: to wean every aspect of our communities from the greenhouse gases that are slowly destabilizing the climate. Doing so will require reversing decades of decentralization and disconnectedness — departing from large-scale, energy-intensive agriculture and relocating food production to front yards, community gardens and greenhouses; incentivizing energy efficiency and rooftop renewables like solar and wind to curb the need for large scale coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants; and nullifying the need for hyper-individualized, fuel-addicted transportation via the providence of bike lanes and accessible and efficient public buses and trains.

On the surface, these structural shifts lie within the realm of possibility, as issues predominantly of urban and rural planning and policy. Beyond the obvious need for resources and support that only governments can provide, however, lies a meta-text of socio-cultural transformation, of creating interdependence in a society built upon isolationism and individualism. Because, at present, we simply do not need each other. I do not need you to eat, or travel or turn my lights on, nor do you need me. But if we were truly committed to a stable planet, to growing different foods that could be traded and shared to satisfy a high percentage of our community’s needs, or if there was a solar array on your roof that produced more power than your hyper-efficient house needed (and that I could then purchase from you), or transportation were a shared entity, interdependence would replace the flagrant human and ecological disconnectedness that currently underlies our day to day lives.

The dreamer in me says that this newfound interdependence could also do much to correct persisting market failures; that by excluding no one — simply on the basis that we cannot afford to — from involvement in the production of clean energy, high quality food and equal access to transportation, we would do much to inject a greater sense of egalitarianism into a society plagued by gross inequalities. As things stand today, local, organic food is a luxury, public transportation a symbol of lower socioeconomic status, and poorer communities the victims of unjust urban planning and the disproportionate impact of large-scale, polluting power plants.

Ultimately, another world is possible. But whether or not it is probable will rely upon the environmental movement’s capacity for inclusion, upon its ability to invite all society’s pluralism into a sphere of collaboration and discussion and mutualism. Just as the solutions to the climate crisis are economy-wide in scope and diverse in nature, so too must the stakeholders be. So to anyone who has ever felt excluded or inadequate or out of place among environmentalists, I beg you to reconsider and to forgive those of us who have not shed our narrow preconceptions of what it means to fight this fight. The simple truth is, we cannot do it without you.