The Gentrification of Environmentalism, or, How Not to Feel Lame

The other day it became strikingly clear to me how genuinely unaffected I’ve been by environmental issues. I’ve never been the victim of environmental injustice. I’ve never been oppressed (outright) by oil companies or arms manufacturers. Having clean water was only ever an issue when the town water companies worked on the pipes, and even then, it was only really an annoyance that delayed showering by an hour or two. I wouldn’t outright call myself a member of any kind of “environmental bourgeoisie,” but I’m certainly not in the position of the proletariat. I could maybe fit the role of the oppressed and marginalized in relation to multinational corporations, but that mentality just isn’t at the forefront of my consciousness on a regular basis. I look at everything that goes on in the news and can’t help but think, “I don’t have it that bad, but why can’t I stop caring?”

Maybe it’s just a matter of empathy. Caring about environmental issues for the sake of less fortunate others is a nice enough idea, but does it contain adequate motivation to justify action? Certainly legions of people would say yes, and maybe the beauty of the motive lies in its utter simplicity. It’s not all that unlike the Golden Rule — maxims are easy because they’re universal and straightforward. “I don’t like it when I can set my tap water on fire (á la Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary Gasland), so I won’t do anything that may put others in a position where their sinks double as grilles.”

But what if I don’t have to worry about flammable tap water, and/or will never be in a position where I have to worry about flammable tap water? It’s worrying about something completely foreign to me — as foreign as one’s neighbors on a suburban street often seem to the typical suburban resident. Even though the shared environment is there, anything to make that connection apparent to an observer isn’t. Call it the plight of the environmental middle class: comfortable enough to observe the problem, yet not endangered enough to care.

These observations bring me back to all the excitement Middlebury’s seen in the past months and the utter indifference I’ve felt towards all of it. I like the idea of divestment — I really, really do. But for whatever reason the dialogue’s tone always came off as unsettling; Schumann Distinguished Scholar-In-Residence Bill McKibben’s presentation at “Midd Does the Math” did, however, reassure me that divestment was something that could be talked about civilly and painted to me a somewhat better impression of the movement. I’m also tremendously excited that people are traveling to Washington, D.C. in the coming days to protest the pipeline. At the same time though, I feel no obligation or motivation to go down there myself and join them. All of these “buts” and “thoughs” only reify a feeling of lameness. I care, but I’m either too busy or too uninterested in the means to take part in certain parts of environmentalism. It’s hard, because I really, really want to be able to place equity in all the parts of environmentalism. There just seems to be some wall barring me from doing so.

This apparent staleness of environmentalism irritates me more than conventions of what constitutes tasteful published writing would allow me to articulate. If anything, I think it may shed light on some kind of necessity to think long and hard about what we want environmentalism to do not just in the world, but at home in our white and gray stone bubble. I’m not saying that environmentalism needs to please everyone, because dissonance, more than anything, may be the objective. What I am saying is the movement shouldn’t exclude. It shouldn’t alienate middle-class environmentalists. What environmentalism and activism need to do is remedy the fragmentation that’s occurred within them over the course of the past 20 or so years. Creating some kind of unified vision just may be worth the trouble.