When I was a young, naive, elementary-school-aged child, I ran a difficult campaign to implement a recycling system in my household. I constructed a solid platform which consisted mostly of me putting a bag in my kitchen and my parents putting the bag away, over and over again. I don’t remember when it happened, but one day the bag stayed out, and one day the bag was filled. It was a momentous victory as an eight year old with a world-saving fixation.
In ENVS, we read a criticism of the individualist slant in the classic Lorax story which teaches us that we as individuals can make a difference if we simply care enough. I would like to defend Dr. Seuss’s famous lesson that, “unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” Michael Maniates was right in criticizing the shift in responsibility away from institutional systems and onto consumers that the individualistic environmental movement seems to lead to, but he was wrong in dismissing the message altogether. What I have learned since my days as an elementary-school “activist” is that people will stick to the status quo unless there is a person, or a group of people, passionate enough and determined enough to call for a change. There is no other way.
This work is exhausting, and complicated, and for a long time fruitless, but we stick with it because we feel a duty or an enthusiasm for doing what we believe to be right.
Since my household recycling days, I have worked on bigger (admittedly more effective) environmental campaigns, and learned much more about the complexity and intersectionality of environmentalism. The thing that has kept me interested through the years is an almost ineffable innate calling. A love of “the outdoors”, an aversion to reckless consumerism, a feeling of duty to protect the abstraction of this planet. I am not a perfect activist or environmentalist by any means, far from it. I continue to run into hypocrisies and conflicting views within myself, but I continue to think about my impact as an individual, and as a person inextricably connected to the people and places on this earth. That is all I can ask for of myself and of others: to tune into our own passions and sense of duties, and to run with them wherever they may take us. This is how we survive.